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!
