Glee Cupcakes 4/13

Update: Our Glee Cupcakes were named #2 on the "20 Most Inventive Cupcakes Known to Man" by koldcast.tv Also, due to the response and requests to make these cuties, there's another update further below to help explain the process.

We are Gleeks and we are proud of it. We are fans of Glee and enjoy every second of it. Glee returns today and we couldn't be more excited. To celebrate its return, we are dedicating a Post to it. We present to you: Glee Cupcakes.

On the show, the Glee kids are considered unpopular and targets for teasing. The main attack is what is called a slushie facial. The football players throw slushies in the faces of the poor Glee Club students. So, not that we condone this sort of behavior but our cupcakes are meant to look like the slushies. We even watched the episodes closely to see that they are called "Big Quench" as opposed to "Big Gulp".

We've been planning this for months. The cupcake challenge was involved too. As has been said before, we do not believe in looks over flavor. We could not let the presentation be better than the taste.  The cupcake challenge yielded a chocolate cupcake as the winner. That doesn't work so well for a slushie cupcake. The vanilla cupcake came in last place at the challenge but we liked it. We did some research, made some improvements and went for it.  Our recipe was a combination of the amended Magnolia Bakery recipe from Cast Sugar and the highly praised one from 52cupcakes.blogspot.com. We went with the following ingredients:

1 3/4 cups cake flour

1 1/4 cups unbleached all purpose flour

2 cups sugar

1 tbspn baking powder

3/4 tspn salt

1 cup unsalted butter

4 eggs

1 cup yogurt

2 tspn vanilla extract

Then we followed the steps on the 52 Cupcakes site. 

The decoration was the next big step for us. We made the frosting and then split it into 3 bowls. We planned on dyeing one blue, one red, and one purple to match typical slushie flavors.

Then we topped them with colored sanding sugar in the same color. 

UPDATE (more details): Then they went into the cups.

Here's a link to a search for the cups. Go for the $3.19 ones.

We cut down 9oz plastic cups to the point where the cupcakes don't slide into the cup anymore. Then we wrapped the labels that we made around the cups and tucked the ends into the cup.

We have to say they came out super cute!!

Happy return of Glee, everybody!

Lessons learned: We don't use as much frosting as most recipes call for, we ended up with A LOT left over. Cake flour is great for cupcakes, we ended up with a nice soft texture that we were aiming for.

1st Quarterly Challenge

Ladies and Gentlemen, we'd like to proudly present our first of the Quarterly challenges. Mostly it's a competition in recipe choice because we just can't help but assist each other but it's a bigger baking endeavor than our usual weekly posts.

This time we chose Cupcakes. Those omnipresent little pastries that seem to gain in popularity no matter how many bakeries specializing in them pop up. Sara maintains a strong fondness for them though I struggle to understand their appeal. I can't help it, I'm a cookie girl.
The rules:
As usual, they had to be made from scratch.
We were allowed to make 24 cupcakes and present 12 for competition.
There were 8 non-biased judges to decide the winner based on overall enjoyment.
The winner gets to write the post and pick the flavor of cupcake in a future post (you'll see).
The contenders:
Sara made a beautiful Cherry Limeade Cupcake with a lime cupcake infused with juice and cherry frosting.
I made a chocolate cupcake with Vanilla frosting. Sounds boring but the secret ingredient was...mayonnaise. Sounds even worse now but you'll hear more later.
The third entry was a collaborative effort between the 2 of us: a vanilla cupcake recipe from Magnolia Bakery (famous in NYC) with Dark Chocolate frosting.
The results:
The third sounds like the second just opposite but we wanted to make a different kind of frosting and the vanilla cupcake recipe sounded so great to us. When we tasted it, Sara thought it tasted like a sprinkles cupcake. It came in third...

Second place went to the Cherry Limeade cupcake that Sara made. Although most judges remarked that the look of the cupcake was most appealing and moistest, they went for a more classic flavor.

The winner was the Chocolate Mayo Cake. To be fair, the judges were not told what they were tasting when they tasted them. They felt tricked when the truth was revealed. A couple proclaimed a hatred for Mayonnaise but they couldn't taste is because they voted for it anyway. 

To be honest, I'm not a big fan of mayonnaise either. In fact, it was the only ingredient on the recipe list that I didn't already have.  I had heard about it from a friend who had cupcakes at her wedding and her guests went crazy over the Mayo cake. I thought it was an interesting idea and did some research.

The problem with a lot of online recipe reviews is that most people exclaim about how excited they are to try it or how yummy it looks. There are very few about how it actually came out for people. A lot of people made comments about how Mayo Cake was something their mom used to make. Not our Mom. And not anyone I know's mom either. I took from this that the use of mayonnaise is an old fashioned technique and grew even more intrigued. 

The recipes that I found on Food Geeks and Pastry Wiz except the latter served about a third more and the measurements were about a third more. I took this to mean that this may be a popular recipe and the one to try.  The recipe on the Food Network Site however was different. It called for Buttermilk which we have discovered we aren't big fans of so I disqualified it. I did see however that they used more cocoa and one reviewer noted that the cake wasn't chocolatey enough and would add mini morsels the next time. I decided to try that since my chosen recipe had less cocoa.

It all went fine. I had my doubts while mixing in the mayo. It looked gross, it smelled gross.

But there was hope to be found with the vanilla extract and water.

Then it started smelling and looking like cake. I added the morsels to all but one cupcake just to see and boy did that ever save it!

The came out beautifully and I frosted them with from scratch vanilla frosting. Perfect!

Lessons learned: Extra chocolate never hurts. You don't always need to "Hold the Mayo."

Happy Valentine's Day

Valentine's Day seemed like the perfect reason to bake something and Sara thought of the perfect thing: Sugar Cookies. We haven't made them much before but the decorating possibilities are endless. For the sometimes baker, there's a great website called Fancy Flours where you can buy some great wafer paper decorations. This avoids having to buy one of those printers that uses edible ink. We ordered our supplies and away we went.
We planned on having our cookies ready for distribution at work before Valentine's day. We started on Wednesday night making the cookies.

Turns out, even with our baking party of four people, it took a lot of time and we had to call it quits around 10pm. It became a 2 night event. We began some of the decorations on night 1 but had to finish up on night 2.

The cookies tasted great and looked great. Some people didn't want to eat them for the art of it all but we firmly believe that flavor should not suffer for looks. These cookies were no exception and we are very glad to have co-workers to share them with instead of having a gluttonous marathon of eating over 50 cookies ourselves.

Lesson learned: Allow more time to make the cookies. Elaborate decorations need more than one school night to complete.

Birthday Baking: Mom 1/9

Mom loves The Wizard of Oz, so we decided to use a theme from the movie for her birthday cake. We decided on blue birds flying over a rainbow cause "Somewhere over the rainbow, blue birds fly. Birds fly over the rainbow, why then oh why can't I?" (Strangely enough, some people didn't get it.)

The first cake was a disaster. Prime candidate for http://www.cakewrecks.com/ The reason was that we used canned frosting. Crumbs from the cake kept breaking off and getting stuck in the frosting. Twas a mess.

Take 2: Make our own frosting. Ah yes, that's the ticket. Tastier too. We also used a metal sandwich spreader and heated it in hot water to make sure the frosting would slide off. Worked like a charm.

Cue the birds: There's a great website called www.bakerella.com that has great instructions on cake pops. Their recipe makes over 40 cake pops but we only wanted a few birds so we chose their oreo cookie truffle recipe instead thinking we would waste less. The truffles came out alright but we wanted to put them on a stick so that they would "fly." Well, a lot of these baby birds were not ready for it. Only one got off the ground but the effect is worth it.

Lessons learned: Make frosting, don't buy. Truffles are not cake pops. Have Sara do the writing on the cake.