Maci-cakes turns 2

My 2-year-old birthday girl!  Love her so much. 

Maci had a Birdie-themed birthday party this year.  

Just a small party with some family and close friends. 

I made a basic white cupcake mix.  Used cake flour and raw sugar. 

I used the mixer bowl for the butter and sugar.  So to beat the egg whites, I used just a plain mixing bowl and lifted it up with a cutting board.  It actually stays in one place too.

Folding in the egg whites.  I always feel like such a fancy baker when I'm "folding" egg whites.

Used little tulip cupcake holders.  Love them.  They worked well because the cupcake topping was so high.  It all stayed contained inside the petals. 

Didn't weigh each cupake this time.  Just kind of eye-balled it.

Cupcakes were topped with a white 7-minute frosting (which, by the way, takes way more than 7 minutes to make).  And a macaroon nest with malted eggs.

Had a chance to use my new cupcake stand from Williams Sonoma.  

A Christmas gift from my sister-in-law.

Party favors for the adults was a boxed set of the cupcakes. 

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.