Black & White

 Lemon Poppy seed cupcake with with fondant and a black embossed flower with gold balls.

Fyi, gold balls should be added immediately or else the fondant hardens and they don't stick anymore. 

 First you make the lemony part, then the egg white part then fold it together with flower and poppy seeds.

 Poppy seeds are folded in with a spatula.

I had to finish decorating them at Rosario.  We stayed there for the weekend then went to a birthday party the next day.  This is where I rolled out the fondant and topped them.  

The biscuit cutter was used to cut out the white circles.  The piping tip for the black circles and the clear stamp with the flower to stamp the black circle.

 Perfect circles, every time. 

Frosty the Snowman

I do believe my cupcake techniques are getting better. I've actually been proud of the last couple of cupcakes I've made. These are coconut cupcakes I made for Joe's company Christmas party and for my piano student's recital. Can you say, "YUM!!"? This is another Martha Stewart recipe that I got out of her Baking Handbook. A deliciously moist cupcake with "7-minute" frosting, which fyi, doesn't take 7 minutes to make. It actually takes about 15 (20 if you count clean-up) but it is DELICIOUS!!! No butter in it, just egg whites, corn syrup and sugar. I used raw sugar and it was just fine.

Then I rolled the fresh-iced cupcakes in sanding sugar. I've purchased all my decorating sanding sugars at Williams-Sonoma. They are larger crystals of sugar. But I'll be totally honest, I compared their green and red sanding sugar to the green or red sprinkles I've purchased at the grocery store and there isn't much difference in appearance. Maybe flavor, but I didn't taste them.

Ah, my snowmen lined up like soldiers in the light of the Christmas tree. I love how the sanding sugar sparkles. I doubled-up my liners, like I always do. But when it came time to presenting them, I went ahead and removed the red and white snowflake liners and just kept the white ones. I kind of liked that even better.

Okay, so I've reached a whole new level of baking with this cupcake. I was tired of producing cupcakes of different mass so I actually weighed every SINGLE cupcake. All the cupcakes have 64 grams of batter. They are perfect. I even did the snowman balls that way. Snowman head was 1 gram, middle was 3, bottom was 5. Hello, Martha! Are you out there? Have I reached your level of awesomeness yet? Perhaps I have exceeded it?!

Look at these beauties. All perfectly round and evenly sized.

Larry the Turkey

I found this recipe online and just had to make them.  Mine didn't exactly turn out like the Duncan Hines photo above.  The kids helped and each tried to make their own.  A lot harder to make than I planned.  

Would love to try them again sometime.

 Our version.  Takes two cupcakes (big and little) and a cookie to make.  

 Our little Katie-bug with her little cupcake.

Poor Larry, he must be exhausted.

Ellie has already picked off the goodies and is now enjoying the moist spice cake.

 Jayden is nibbling on the cookie part.  Yum.