Cupcake Rewards

Camera's out of the state right now but I am still baking. Not every day, not even every week. but I try to find reasons (like Earth Day) to bake. Tomorrow I am baking cupcakes because... one of my favorite customers (who only has ever bought one thing actually...) came back before I had to leave. =) There's a story behind it. If he didn't come back, he was getting rat poison (not really) if he came back, he got yummy ones. He gets yummy ones. I'm thinking I'll do low-fat and chocolate... not sure yet. Letting my tummy settle down from dinner before I decide.

Any ideas send them to me.

Until next time,

Buhri

Earth Day!

Earth Day Work Cupcakes!

Chocolate vegan cupcake, vegan buttercream frosting, and... food coloring!

XD Oh yes, I am having fun.

Until next time,

Buhri

Sowwy...

School makes me look at the kitchen and be sad. I go through cookbooks in my spare time and wish my spare time added up to longer than 5 minutes before I have to work on homework or study or... sleep or eat real food. Speaking of food... I actually need to eat something right now before I go to sleep.

This is me apologizing for not uploading pictures after pictures because... I'm tired and school makes me even more tired.

But... I am going to try and make colorful cupcakes because who does not like colorful cupcakes?

Until next time,

Buhri

Ladybugs and Rainbows

First... the ladybugs. I got the idea from the book, "The Whimsical Bakehouse" but, seeing as I don't have everything they have... I improvised. Big time.
This is one time where I won't post a recipe because... it was kind of a trial and error, 'hey what'll this look like!' kind of a thing. The cupcake is just regular vanilla that I made last night and froze, the frosting is actually a chocolate glaze (recipe in The Whimsical Bakehouse but I modified it to make it smaller).

And now... the green and red ladybugs.


You'll notice the green ladybugs have pupils, the red ones do not. I was getting fed up with the wafer chocolate you see... and I like the non-pupil look. It's kinda freaky and makes you want to eat them just so you don't have to see it.
Aha, you're learning my tricks now. =D




Close up of the spooky non-pupiled eyes.




His pupil is kind of falling off of his eye... not as creepy as no pupil but still very odd.



Ladybug cupcake love.
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Doesn't that look yummy?



Mmm...



There were only three rainbow cupcakes. But they look just soooo yummy!

And now... for the finale, the piece de resistance... the Real-Life Cupcake... with Wings.



There it is after I piped it out onto parchment paper. I still have to work on my chocolate piping skills, but I think it's cute. (I wish I had candy colors so it could be rainbowy!)



I like the back, it's not lumpy.



You can kind of see my Easter, fuzzy bunny cupcake tins, my cupcakes were small like they always are, so I had to peel them down to dip the tops in the chocolate.



And there it is... the last of the cupcakes all gathered together.
I had a lot of fun making those ones, if I can find candy colors I'll be experimenting more. Maybe I'll try brown and white chocolate piping with colored buttercreams (I have icing gels)!

There it is... a whole night's worth of baking when I should have been working.

Until next time,

Buhri

It lives!

My latest cupcake escapade made me realize... while I enjoy baking, I could never do it as a profession seeing as I get very grumpy at my cupcakes and sometimes yell at them. But... I do have fun photographing the finished result.

I made a real-life CUPCAKE WITH WINGS, and put it on a cupcake... it was fun. =D
Pictures to come after I can get to the big computer.
Whee!

Until later tonight,

Buhri

Myspace claims another!

http://www.myspace.com/cupcakeswithwings

I was bored, kitchen was occupied, so I played with a few things and I made a Myspace for Cupcakes With Wings.

=) I think it's time to make a real life Cupcake with Wings.
If you're passing by here I challenge you to also make a Real Life Cupcake with Wings, take a picture and share it with me! If enough people do it I'd be tempted to turn it into a contest with a real life prize! =D How can you resist?

Haha, ah, well I hope everyone is doing amazing!

Until next time,

Buhri

New Images and more...

Hello everyone,

So I haven't made any cupcakes lately but it is finals week so I am pretty busy and everything studying and procrastinating ^.^ But I did make some cupcake images! Here's a header I haven't gotten to fit yet, I like it anyway, you can find more at my photobucket website!





http://s262.photobucket.com/albums/ii89/Cupcakesandearrings/

On a separate note... I'm thinking of making a MySpace account for this. =) I'd love to start making and selling cupcakes, though I know I'd need to do a bunch of stuff before I can do that.
Any ideas, suggestions, etc.

Until next time,

Buhri

Make Cupcakes Not War

I am in love with this site:
http://www.johnnycupcakes.com/blog/

How can you not be? Look at it! =D



Until Next Time,

Buhri

Down with Fondant!

My own silent war with fondant has been building for quite some time and now I feel like sharing with anyone who wanders here that, fondant is horrible. Sure it makes things look pretty but it makes them taste horrible! I honestly would prefer my food looked weird and tasted great than the other way around. Food is for eating, not just looking.

There has to be something delicious you can make in place of fondant that looks just as good and tastes so much better. Why do all bakers resort to fondant? Why can't we find something that tastes better and looks just as good?

Even Ace of Cakes does it. Every cake they make is usually... fondant. Sometimes there's not even cake involved. I don't like that show anymore because of that. I watched it for awhile and noticed everything got covered with fondant and sometimes there wasn't any cake in their creation (anyone remember the dinosaur?) Rice Krispies was the only really edible thing on that dinosaur!

Okay... I have to end my rant because it's time to get ready for my day job.

Check back for my "Congratulations on your Pregnancy" cupcakes!
I love my friends. =)


Until next time,

Buhri

Low-Fat Vegan Cupcakes with Vegan Chocolate Buttercream Frosting

Guess who finally made something!

I did make truffles for a friend for Valentine's but I never remebered to take pictures of them before I mailed them off. Tonight however, I made low-fat vanilla vegan cupcakes with full-fat chocolate vegan buttercream frosting. I haven't tried the cupcakes yet but the frosting is delicious! Seriously, once I frosted them, I kept nibbling from the bag, finally I just filled a mini cupcake holder and tossed the rest.

Don't know the recipes off the top of my head and I should hit the hay soon so... someone remind me to post them! Hopefully I'll remember... but, I'm pretty sure we all know how absent minded I can be. Until then, enjoy some pictures:

Cupcakes cooling. Look at the Little Mermaid cupcake tins! I love Michaels! ^.^

Close-up of the cupcake and frosting, got new frosting tips at Michael's as well.

That was my frosting snack, the cupcake tin is what I used for the truffles.

Frosted cupcakes! Look at all the random designs... some I tried to make look like flowers. Heh. In the background are some individual cupcake holders, 'Cup-A-Cake'. The name's cute, I haven't tried them out yet, they were a gift from my mother.

Close-up of some of the cupcakes and the last of the images.
=)

Keep yelling at me to bake things, I try not to ignore you guys.

Until next time,

-Buhri

Suggestions

I made really good chocolate orange cupcakes. I food-dyed the frosting orange and the frosting was delicious. After I frosted them all I kept piping frosting onto my finger and eating it. I made it with orange extract instead of liquor.

I'm not sure what I will bake next but I am always open to suggestions. You suggest it, I'll try it. =)

Until next time,

-Buhri

I need flavors...

The people I work with and go to class with have become my guinea pigs. My taste testers. I bake my cupcakes, cookies, pies, or cakes and I give it to them and hope they'll tell me, needs more this, less this, or oh my goodness... can I have more? Or, I'd rather you never make that again.

My Saturday class will, for 6 more weeks, be enjoying a new kind or two of cupcakes every morning. Next Saturday it will be Vegan Boston vs. Brooklyn Cream Cupcakes (courtesy of Vegan Cupcakes Will Take Over the World) and some other kind... which kind I don't know so I need you guys to help me out!


=) I have tons of cookbooks, so mention a name and I'll ask for a recipe if I can't find one.
Help me find recipes!

Don't forget to reply!

-Buhri

Chocolate Orange Vegan Cupcakes

Hello all!
A vegan recipe from my vegan cookbook. Of course you can substitute the vegan ingredients for non-vegan ones but vegan cupcakes do make a nice change from the heavier non-vegan ones.

Chocolate Orange Cupcakes
1 cup soy milk (rice milk will work, but soy milk curdles better -vegan buttermilk)
1 tsp. apple cider vinegar (can substitute lemon juice or white vinegar or brown rice vinegar works =3 )
3/4 cup organic granulated sugar (organic usually is not processed with animal bone char)
1/4 cup canola oil
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1/3 cup orange liqueur
1 cup all-purpose flour (again, organic is best)
1/3 cup cocoa powder (Dutch-processed is best)
1 Tbs finely grated orange peel (optional, depends how orangey you want it)
3/4 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt

1. Preheat your oven to 350 degress F, and like the authors Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero remind us in every recipe, line your muffin pan right away with paper or foil liners.

2. Whisk together the soy milk and vinegar in a large bowl (this will be your main mixing bowl, I whisk them in my KitchenAid bowl) and let sit for a few minutes so the two may curdle.

3. Add the sugar, oil, extract, and liqueur to the soy milk mixture and beat until it is foamy. You want a nice layer of white froth covering the top. A KitchenAid is great for this because while your batter is mixing and frothing, you can start the next step.

4. In a separate bowl, sift together the flour, cocoa powder, baking soda, baking powder, and salt (add the orange peel if you are using it). When I say 'sift together' I mean, set your sifter in the bowl you're using (not the soy milk mixture bowl) and start putting the ingredients in the sifter, but don't sift until all ingredients are added.

5. Add the dry mixture in two batches to wet ingredients and beat until no large lumps remain, and again, like the authors say, a few little lumps are okay.

6. Pour the mix (it will be kind of liquidy) into the liners, filling 3/4 of the way full. Bake 18-20 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean. Put them on your cupcake cooking rack, or a regular cooling rack and start working on the frosting! (It should make 12 cupcakes)

Orange Buttercream Frosting
1/4 cup shortening
1/4 cup margarine, softened (I recommend having it out while you're making the cupcakes)
2 cups confectioners' (powdered) sugar
2 Tbs orange juice
1 Tbs finely grated lemon zest (orange peel will work too)
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp orange extract (I could not find orange extract so I used more orange juice and it tasted yummy still)

1. In a small bowl (again, I used my KitchenAid), cream the shortening and margarine until well combined.

2. Add the confectioners' sugar in roughly 1/2 cup additions.
After each addition of sugar, add a splash of orange juice and beat well with a handheld mixer on medium speed.

3. Add vanilla and beat for 3-5 minutes until smooth, creamy, and fluffy.

Make sure you cream the shortening and margarine well! And beat it for 3-5 minutes! I messed up on those two steps and you saw the result, tastes good, looks bad.

Until next time,

-Buhri

Pictures for the new year

Did you know it's 2008? I didn't today, causing all sorts of trouble at work. =)

Well, I finally sat down and took the pictures off the camera's disk, cropped them, and uploaded them to photobucket.
Did you notice the name change? I am now Cupcakes with Wings because... I may like earrings, but I left them out a lot and focused more on the cupcake part so, cupcakes with wings because cupcakes are nice. Even Devil's Food cupcakes have wings... cute little bat wings. Hehe =D

Mint Cupcakes


This is from my aunt and uncle's birthday. They are mint chocolate cupcakes topped with chocolate ganache and either a white or dark chocolate chip.
I used rice milk in the frosting. That is why it looks so drippy, it tasted fine but to make it look pretty you have to use soy or regular milk.







Now on to the Cookies and Cream Cupcakes...

Before they were frosted...



After being frosted, being presented to the birthday people.





Don't you just wanna eat 'em up?

Vanilla Cupcake with Orange Buttercream frosting... I made these awhile ago, but they got eaten so this was the last one left.


Again, rice milk instead of soy. What can I say, all I had was rice. Looked bad, tasted great.

As for the orange chocolate cupcakes, there's an unsolved mystery with them.
I made a batch of 12, went to sleep, woke up and there were 7 1/2 left. Only four people in the house and everyone denied eating them. The puppies and cats couldn't deny it but they didn't look guilty or sick so... I don't think they did it. So, no pictures because I never frosted them and no one ate them. They wound up getting forgotten about and when I did remember them, they'd gone stale so I tossed them. I'm waiting for a liquor store to be open when I pass by so I can buy some orange liqueur for the cupcakes. Mmm... liquor in baked goods. =D

Oh! Before I close this... if you want to see more pictures go to my photobucket account: http://cupcakesandearrings.photobucket.com

Until next time,

-Buhri