Soooo Bee-hind :)

So I admit it, I am way behind - especially since it's been a busy busy cupcaking month!! :)

To catch up going to do a quick month-in-review highlight post...starting with the 200 Bee-Hive cupcakes my friend Christy and I decorated for my church's vacation Bible School the first week of August. I say we decorated them as folks from the church actually baked the cupcakes for us - which was awesome! As much as I love baking - for me really the fun part of cupcaking is the decorating! :) However, eventhough we only did the frosting, it was still quite the project! We did most of the cupcakes in simple "bee-hive" frosting topped with a sugar paste bee from my favorite baking shop in Western PA (my mother-in-law was sweet enough to priority mail 150 bees to me at the last minute!) In addition did two dozen bee cupcakes with marshmallow wings and chocolate frosted stripes as well as a dozen mini-hives with frosted doors. All in all, think they turned out pretty well and all the kids seemed pretty excited to end the week of VBS with a cupcake ceremony! Was simply a buzzzzzzzzzzing good time!

The Bee Cupcakes Buzzing around!

The Bee-Hive's coming to life!

Christy finishing our set-up...not quite cupcakes wars but not bad!

And the final ensemble...ready for the kiddos! (yes I have icing all over my shirt :)

Kellan trying to steal Ethan's name-tag during the opening ceremony. Then hanging out with his fav bible-school buddy Sarah later in the week. Such a fun week!

After the crazy week of Bible-school I had every intention of laying low on the cupcake front for a few weeks...however since the folks from church made all of the cupcakes I ended up with an extra 6 dozen frozen in the fridge as I had started to bake the week ahead just in case Christy and I needed to bake and decorate the cupcakes for VBS - so I couldn't just let them stay frozen - could I??  :) :) 

Well, turns out that having frozen cupcakes in the freezer is really a dangerous thing for me...First up was Chad's birthday! Since he is a definite car guy (being that he works at Porshe :) I decided to do fun fancy car cupcakes for him...Porshe, BMW, and Audi. Then when Jeremy saw me working on the car-cakes (which he found amusing as I kept googling the logos online and then standing in front of the computer icing the cupcake while looking at the logo :) he challenged me to do jeep ones too. I told them they didn't really fit with my fancy foreign car theme but he pointed them out that they did fit in with the one of Chad's favorite car theme so he won and we ended up with jeep ones too :)

Close up of the jeep cupcakes Jeremy peer-pressured me into making!

Hmmm...maybe I need to start making cupcakes for car dealerships :)

All packed up and ready for Chad's Birthday celebration!

And earlier that day...the Birthday boy with some of his fav little guys!

The day after Chad's Birthday made some random cupcakes for a meeting at work. The fun thing about these ones  (as I realize they aren't that fancy :) is that I snuck home at lunch time after Kellan's 9month doctors appointment and made these because a few guys who were in from Europe gave me a hard time - saying they had heard about my cupcakes and were dissapointed not to get to try them, etc. Of course what they didn't realize is that I took this as a challenge and felt the need to decorate cupcakes quick for my afternoon meeting with them. So since I had the cupcakes in the freezer and hard yellow and black icing left from the porshe cupcakes from Chad's birthday cupcakes I threw them together and waa-laa Pittsburgh cupcakes :) Not that I meant to really make PIttsburgh cupcakes, but being a Pittsburgh girl, anything black and gold is instantly a Pittsburgh thing! :)  In any case think the cupcakes made their trip from Europe worthwhile ;-) haha. Okay so maybe it was really their productive and effective meetings all week that made the trip valuable - but I am guessing they will at least remember my meeting the  most!  

The random and quick (GO Pittsbugh) cupcakes for work...

Then with the last 2 dozen cupcakes I made UVA cupcakes for Pat who finished his UVA masters program last month! Quite the accomplishment for him (and his awesome wife who was super duper supportive of his endeavors - especially since she also works and they have an engergetic and on the go almost 2 year old son!) In anycase, since the day of his last presentation was a Concert Friday thought UVA cupcakes would make a great concert treat. And since I ended up home late that morning waiting on the treadmill doctor to install my new deck and belts on my treadmill (guess I ran too hard on the last one as was completely cracked in half...oops :) it was the perfect time to throw the cupcakes together! You will note that there are only 12 in the picture but that is because I tried this new spray on "color mist" on the cupcakse which is actually kind of cool, but I didn't like how they looked for the UVA cupcakes - so these ones also went to work (yes I am quickly making new friends at my new office - they are all about "mess-up" cupcakes). 

The UVA Cupcakes already for the concert!

Packed up in the wagon...waiting for Pat to get to the concert too! 

My favorite boys on the way to the concert...LOVE (and miss!) SUMMER FRIDAYS!

Aww such a fun summer...can't believe it's over already. Here is the last set of summer cupcakes - the sun and swimming bear ones I had been wanting to make all summer. I saw a picture of these while researching the bride-groom cupcakes I did for the shower earlier this year and LOVED them. Finally, to add to the fun of a weekend at the beach with my favorite Lafayette girls I had the excuse to make them. Since my freezer stock was empty I had to bake some new ones - but did simple vanilla ones again with vanilla frosting (my favorite :). The exciting part of these cupcakes was that they were half smiley suns - just like I used to draw them when I was little with sunglasses and half blue water icing with swimming teddy grahms in gummy life-savers. Oh and I actually did use the blue "spray-on" mist food coloring that I didn't like on the UVA cupcakes and it was PERFECT for creating water and way easier then making blue and white icing and then trying to evenly put both the blue in white in one icing bag to give the mixed blue/white look of water. Instead I simply frosted the cupcakes in the white icing and then sprayed the blue on lightly so some of the white still showed as well- SO EASY. YAY! :)

BEACH TIME! :)

Sunshine cupcakes for a sunny weekend at the beach!

Poolside cupcake service...doesn't get much better then this!

Okay...well that gets me somewhat caught up. Going to do my best to keep catching up...still have firetruck and baby rattle cupcakes from the past two weeks to come - but have to get to bed tonight. Have another busy work and running and cupcaking week or rather month ahead - going to be a fun but busy fall! :)

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Monkey Madness

Monkeys for a Baby Shower at the end of July in Western PA! Although they were rather rushed - they turned out pretty okay. Mainly, I must say, thanks to my AWESOME friend and Cupcake Buddy Christy who actually baked the cupcakes for me so all I had to do was decorate! I have mentioned Christy in many of my posts as she is my go to "Cupcake Consultant" as we always have fun bouncing baking/decorating ideas off each other and trying new things. She really is amazing and the super fun part is that while we both like cupcaking in general - she focuses on trying new flavors of cake and icing wheras I would try new decorations - so it's a perfect combination (I think at least!) In any case, these cupcakes were a new flavor for her to try so she liked the challenge and I ended up with awesome cupcakes to turn into monkeys!  The cupcakes were banana ones - think she said she put 3 whole bananas in - YUM - they were sooo good! 

I then decorated them with a mix of chocolate and banana peanut butter frosting. I do have to admit that although it turned out pretty well, the banana peanut butter frosting was not planned :) and in fact was somewhat of a fiasco before it was all said and done :)  I am just not having good luck with my icing lately!!! The icing fiasco started after we spent Friday night at our local SR concert and I might have drank a little too much wine (oops :), so I was essentially still half asleep when I made the frosting the next morning and resultingly it just wasn't right and I def wasn't a fan of the flavor. Not sure what I might have done wrong, but because we were on a tight time schedule to get to PA, just didn't have time to start over...Adding to the dilemna, I still had not restocked my food color stash, so I didn't have the right color for the Monkey face...agggghhhh....what to do, what to do? Following the lead of the DC Cupcake girls (again!) I started searching the kitchen for what I could use to fix the icing in both taste and color! Luckily I had one more banana in the basket so I mashed it up and threw it in the icing. It immediately helped with the flavor and actually started to help with the coloring as well. However I added WAY to much banana and the icing consistency became way to wet. Quickly added lots more powdered sugar to help made it a better spreadable consistency. Luckily, while in the cupboard pulling out he sugar, I saw the peanut butter - hmmmmm that might work - figured it was worth a shot to get color close so I threw some in. Not bad...color ended up pretty perfect and the flavor was actually pretty yummy too! YAY!   

The Monkeys on Display on the Cake Table (notice the super cute cupcake papers Christy found at Wegmans - who knew that was such a great place for cupcake supplies!!!!!)

All in all a fun day with my favorite cupcake fans. Okay well K and Sammie can't really eat cupcakes quite yet, but they will soon enough and Syd is all about them!

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Back from Bakation...

Sooo somehow my bakation turned into a blogcation too :) Just has been a CRAZY month - between going to Florida for a long weekend with my mom and sister-in-law (and Kellan of course - he was the only boy allowed!) and starting a new role with a new client at a new site and of course spending every Friday night at the SR concert series July has been pretty much been a whirlwind!

The Little Man ready to roll to Friday Night's Concert!!

Loving every minute of the girls weekend in Florida!!

One of the most exciting things about my first week at the new client site was finding out that they were holding a baking contest that Friday as a part of the annual Family Day Fesitivies - what timing!! Then even more exciting was clicking on the link to see that not only was it a baking contest but it was a cupcake contest!! Bakation instantly OVER! :) :) :)

After a quick email discussion with my favorite cupcake consultant Christy :) we agreed that due to the quick turn around time (being that it was already Tuesday), my favorite pie cupcakes - in a mix of cherry and blue berry (for a red, white and blue, effect) was the way to go as they are fairly easy and the only things I needed to get was a can of blueberry pie mix and the light brown food coloring for the "dough" icing. Of course, in the July craziness, it was suddenly Thursday night and I never made it to Michaels or the Party Store to grab the food coloring I needed. Thus was a bit unsure as to how to make the right color frosting. My first attempt involved trying "copper" which for some reason I thought I had used before - WRONG. At least for a pie crust look. Copper is really a skin color food color...so now I had a big batch of skin colored icing. Now what to do. Looking for anything brown in the cupboard I pulled out brown sugar and added it in - BAD IDEA. While it actually tasted pretty good - it made the color worse and gave the icing a terrible texture, so the icing went in the garbage and I was back to the drawing board.

Returning to my baking cupboard and feeling very DC cupcake like (if you saw the first episode, the Georgetown Cupcake girls were stuck trying to find out a way to color their large batch of icing without adding a bitter taste of too much food die, so they used fresh strawberries and blueberrys to help with the color in a natural way!) I pulled out cinnamon and vanilla, thinking I would try a Cinnamon Vanilla Buttercream. It took a lot of mixing and adding and tasting and mixing, etc to get it right, but in the end it was one of the best batches of frosting I've made and it looked perfect as pie crust - YAY! :)

Cupcake all ready for the big All American Family Day Contest!

The contest turned out to be a lot of fun - I enjoyed checking out all of the 10 or so sets of cupcakes entered. It was a mix of cute (pool cupcakes with teddy grahms swimming in lifesaver intertubes) and fancy cupcakes (double chocolate mint topped with green icing and a mint candy). My favorite entry though was a sweet potato cupcake with cream cheese frosting - which was absolutely AWESOME! I even emailed the contest coordinator to see if she could get me the recipe (luckily it was actually her husbands recipe so I am getting it next week and will be trying it soon!)

Of course, the best part of the contest was that I did win, overall best cupcake :) Thought that was a pretty fun way to kick off my new job, although now my new team knows about my little hobby and I am fairly sure they will be expecting more cupcakes soon...oh well just a great excuse to bake more!

 And last but not least here (as promised) is a quick picture history of some of my earliest cupcakes :)

My first somewhat "fancy" cupcakes. Made for Jeremy's friend Braden. These cupcakes made such an impression on Braden that he actually made reference to them during his toast at our wedding. The funny thing being that until after we were married, I really didn't bake much!!

My first office baking contest victory :) at the office Christmas Party 2008. The leaves are pre-made fondant so not my favorite taste, but they ended up pretty cute - and tasted good enough I guess!

First All-out Cupcake Effort (involved planning to make sure I had the gold paper, the littlemedals - which Kathy's son's LOVED, and chocolate molds for the faces, etc). Really I cannot even tell you how excited I was about these ones. They were for the 2008 South Riding Running Club Party! The things on the runners heads are supposed to be headlights!

Someone bought finally bought a starter decorating kit complete with tips and icing bags :) looks like things are getting serious! :) Cupcakes for my friend Katie's bridal shower. Though not my best work, they turned out pretty well (even making the trip up to LockHaven :) and more importantly I started learning how to use decorating tips and bags which turned out to be a BIG step in my cupcake career :)

Okay...well being that this busy month is not quite over, better get to bed so I have energy to take on the last few days of July and to kick-start an AWESOME August! Happy Baking :)

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Bakation :)

Sooooo for the past few weeks I have been taking a "bakation," rather just not really baking cupcakes - I say not really as while on our real vacation to Deep Creek my 2.5 year old niece and I made some fun cupcake monsters! I made the cupcakes before heading on vacation then we decorated them the first night - so fun!

Getting ready to make some monsters!

What a great helper!!

Cupcake Monsters on Parade!

Sprinkle Monsters!

Testing the cupcakes...eating the monsters eyes first!

And then today I made my favotie cookie dough cupcakes for a friend whose birthday is tomorrow  - but besides that I have not done any baking (well besides break and bake cookies I have to admit :)

 Chocolate Chip Cupcakes with a Cookie dough surprise inside!

While on the break from baking, we spent a week at Deep Creek relaxing and just enjoying the Mountains and Lake and mainly the extra time with Kellan! It was so nice to have all day every day with him for a change. He is at a really fun age - although his teeth are definitely coming in so he has been a bit clingy and fussy - but being that he is super smiley 90% of the time we still can't complain! He seemed to love the lake and all the time to play with his cousin Sydney! All in all a good time!

LOVING the LAKE! :) Such a beach bum already - guess that's what happens when your bedrooms decorated in surf-boards ;)

Chilling with Cousin Syd and helping Aunt Jodi make blankets by weighing it down for her!

Best seat by the lake...tuckered out after too much fun - then goofing off with Daddy

So as much as I love baking it has been nice to take a break both at the lake and here in VA! Think in another week or so will be ready to be back at it :) Until then may have to pull out some old cupcake pics...hmmm. That could be fun...seeing how it all started...exciting, I know bet you can't even wait. Hehe. For now happy Summer!

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Every morning deserves a great cup of coffee!

Or at least a cupcake of coffee...yummm caffiene and sugar!

Last Friday, I started the day with an AWESOME run. We had a break in the heat wave and it was relatively cool and humidity was low. Unfortunately I didn't have anyone to run with so despite wanting to stay in bed, I forced myself out the door planning just to run my usual quick 4 to just get the miles in before work - however I was pleasantly surprised with how great it felt to run - and ended up doing about 6.5ish. And had I not had to get myself to work for an early meeting I may have actually had my first long run of my marathon training (oh well that will have to wait for another day :) It just felt so good to be out in the early morning enjoying the sunshine and blue skies of the beautiful day to come.

For some reason, while enjoying the peace and quiet of the run, I found myself thinking about how excited I was to have my morning cup of coffee when I got back. I am essentially addicted to Dunkin Donuts Hazlenut coffee, so after being out of it for most of the week, I finally had time to stock up at DD's on the way to work Thursday, so I was super excited for my morning fix on Friday. It's funny I think I enjoy coffee even more nowafter being pregnant last year than before. I remember wondering while I was pregnant if I was missing coffee (not that I couldn't drink coffee it just didn't taste good) or red-wine more and I have since realized the answer is definitely coffee :) In any case, it is a part of my morning that I definitely look forward to every day,whether I end up drinking it on my way to work sitting in traffic or during my first hour of checking emails and getting things started for the day, it always seems to make my day start off on a positive note!

To that end, made these cupcakes a few weeks ago for the SR running club annivesary breakfast. And yes, they are frosted with Dunkin Donuts Hazelnut flavored coffee icing - what could be better cupcakes and coffee, right ?! :-) The cupcakes are just basic chocolate and vanilla - but the coffee icing definitely made them a special treat. And just for fun I topped them with chocolate hazelnut straws I grabbed at Costco for just this kind of cupcake! Not the typical morning treat, but think they still went over pretty well!

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Shhhhh....it's a Surprise!

Who doesn't LOVE a surprise shower?? Well, unless you are the one planning it - then there's the weeks of tip-toeing around trying not to spill the beans - this would be why I do not host many (or really any)- surprise parties - I am tooo big of a big-mouth and am not good at keeping such a secret :) But that said, it's definitely fun when pulled off well, and my co-worker and friend Ginger went all out (ie printing fake invitations, making pseudo plans, calling her salon for them to help with the story, etc) in surprising her daughter Kim last week with a surprise bridal shower and from what I gather it was an all-around success and good time! And lucky me, Ginger asked me to be in on the fun and make cupcakes for the big day!!

I was especially excited to make these as I have never made bridal shower cupcakes before. The only direction Ginger gave me was that she wanted 3 dozen and Kim's colors were pink and black. Hmmmm. ALmost tooo much freedom...so what to do. My favorite cupcaking buddy, Christy and I googled pink and black cupcakes and wedding cupcakes, and talked about different options until we finally came accross a great picture of a bride and groom cupcake set. (http://www.giggyscakes.com/Cupcakes.html )

Sure, there are actually lots of pictures of these kind of cupcakes online, BUT the problem is most of them use fondant and neither of us are big fans of Fondant. Not that there is anything wrong with fontdant - please don't get me wrong I have seen AMAZING things done with fondant- it's just I have never loved how it tasted (probably the problem is I've never really had good fondant :) and it's just not quite my style. In any case, the picture we found  was super cute and used a little dipped icing (melted canned icing for a hardened surface) under regular icing but no fondant-score!

So here is my version of Giggy's cupcakes. I have to admit I was pretty excited how they turned out and the best part was they were super fun to make! I felt like a little wedding dress designer or something. At first I was making all the dresses the same but then I got a little adventurous and started making each one a little different! So the long and short of it, as I mentioned before I used melted canned frosting (because homemade frosting doens't work for melting) and dipped the cupcakes in it to get the smooth skin of the brides and shirts of the grooms. (basic technique from the Hello Cupcake book). Then I just used a star tip to do the tuxedo and dresses and a small round tip to do the bows and pearls. Then I added a few hot gum paste flowers (wish I could take credit for them, but I bought them at my favorite little baking shop in Western Pa last week :) and waalaa...It's here come's the Bride Time!!!

And here's the whole wedding party on parade...

all dressed up and ready to go!!! :) :)

And to coordinate with the bride and groom cupcakes I had fun with pink and polka dots :)

Here they are getting all boxed up...

 And all three dozen ready for the big surprise... 

Happy Shower Kim - Congratulations -  Happy Forever!

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Welcome to the Future!

Went to Father of the Bride, with a girl back home.

We broke up before the sequel, so went to that one on my own.

Wondered who I'd end up with, what would our kids look like?

Guess I got my answer as I tuck them in tonight....

Heeeeyyyyyyy. Don't think Dream's come any truer.

Boys, welcome to the Future! ~Brad Paisley

We saw Brad Paisley a few weeks ago and while he did not sing this little extra verse from his song Welcome to the Future, I have been listening to his CD so much the past few weeks (because the concert was absolutely AMAZING and I am hooked on his music for the moment!! ) that this has been playing in my head pretty much non-stop while running, baking, driving, working, etc...I LOVE IT. Sure I did not marry one of the lead actors (or actresses in Brad's case) from Father of the Bride ;-) but the rest of it still resonates so perfectly I think. I mean who didn't wonder when they were younger who they would spend the rest of their life with, what they would be doing now or what their kids would look like?? I know I did. And while I look forward to life ahead and definitely have goals and dreams I still aspire to achieve, many of my dreams and hopes have already coming true in Jeremy and Kellan.

My three favorite minutes of my days right now are 1. Coming home from my morning run to see Jeremy and Kellan sleeping side by side (I move K into our bed after I feed him before running) they just look so sweet and K seriously looks like J's mini-me. 2. Picking up K from school - I stress and rush through traffic but it is all worth it when I walk into the infant room and he looks up at me smiling ear-to-ear. And 3. When J gets home from work and Kellan first sees him - and gives him a copy of the grin he gave me earlier in the evening. Just priceless.

Sure there are lots of not-so fun moments like washing bottles, emptying the diaper pail, never feeling like I have a moment to sit down after work until I'm in bed exhausted, but these three moments brief as they may be make it all okay (not to mention all the other wonderful moments mixed in throughout the day of course!!).  Then mix in a decent return to my fav hobbies of running and baking, great family in PA who loves to see K as much as possible, a pretty good job that is looking to get even better over the next few months, and yeah would have to say "Don't think Dreams come any truer" and I am indeed pretty excited to welcome my little guy to the future! :)

And going back to the weekend of the Brad Paisley show when I was not at the AWESOME concert and tailgate, I did make a bunch of Birthday Boy cupcakes I wanted to share. The first cupcakes were blue pick up trucks and traffic lights. Looked and looked for ideas on how to make pick-up truck cupcakes but did not have much luck finding anything. Guess it is not a popular request :) Thus headed out to the party store last week in search of any ideas and short of just putting match-box trucks on top of cupcakes I did not find much. Although while there I stocked up on tootsie rolls, m&m's and blue air-heads to see if I could do anything with them - kind of like how I made the trains out of tootsie rolls and m&ms a few weeks back. Tooks a bit of candy sculpting...but the end result somewhat resembles pick up trucks. Some of them may looks a little more like tractor trailors (as my mom thought I was making - haha) but think together the general idea is there. Hey it's like abstract art :) and making trucks out of candy ended up being a bit tougher than I had anticipated!

Then for the party on Sunday - I ventured into the super hero world of Batman and Spiderman! Again did a bit of internet searching for ideas and also found fun Batman and Spiderman cupcake papers. For these ones stuck with straight icing work - with the exception of using mini-marshmallos for the Spidey eyes. The one trick I have been doing quite a bit lately though - is buyin Wilton's pre-made black icing because I cannot seem to make a good black (not to mention it's super messy and a pain to deal with :) so that made things quite a bit easier since black was the main detail color for both Spiderman and Batman. In the end they turned out pretty well and the birthday boy seemed to love them and really - that's all that mattered!! :)

And last but not least...here is the Birthday Boy Making his Birthday Wish...

So heeeeeeeeeeeeyyyyy...hope you find your dreams don't come any truer too..Welcome to the future! :)

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