And like that ... it's 2011!

Not sure how it's 2011 and not sure I even have truly accepted that it is. Just this morning as I was tidying up and putting Kellans' bottle from school yesterday in the dish washer - as I pulled off the date tape I realized I had written 1-7-10 on it - oops (good thing they weren't audited yesterday :) Made me think though - wow. What a difference a year makes. On 1-7-10 I was still on maternity leave, Kellan was definitely not at daycare yet, he definitely wasn't sleeping yet (although in some ways that part hasn't really changed!), he was barely smiling yet. And to look at him now - just this week he officially started in the toddler I class at daycare wher they sit at the table for snacks, they color, they take naps on cots, he is walking - practically running  all over the place. He is definitely not a baby anymore - and I love that as everyday he is more fun, shows more personality, does something new - just can't believe it was only a year ago he was my little peanut sleeping for hours curled up on my chest. 2010 was a wonderful year - just went too fast!

So what does all that have to do with cupcakes - nothing really I suppose. Except for in my realization that it is really officially 2011, I am WAY behind on posting about all the 2010 cupcakes I made. And as I look back - 2010 was probably the busiest baking year I've had! Thus, going to try my best to squeeze in as many cupcakes here as I can - may take more than one post...all depends on when the little man decides to get up (yes he is still sleeping - but that is only becuase he is not a big fan of sleeping between the hours of 2-5 right now!) Okay so here goes...

Looks like I left off (just had to open my blog to look...ha.) with my late summer cupcakes. So will pick up with the firetruck and firedogs I made for Mr. E's birthday party. Mr. E always seems to have high expectations for my cupcakes as I think I set the bar a little too high with monkey cupcakes for his third birthday and then spongebob ones for his fourth. In any case - I look forward to his party and the cupcake challenge it presents every year - so 2010 was no different...

The final cupcakes ended up with White chocolate molded firetrucks and fire hydrants with icing hoses with tootsie roll nozzles (yes the tootsie rolls ARE hose nozzles not "presents" left by the dogs at the fire hydrants as my husband and Kellans' friends Leah's dad askeds so - silly boys!!!) and the main thing Mr. E wanted was Fire dogs so had to make sure we had dalmations with fireman hats!

The whole set assembled for the big birthday party!!!

My little fireman - checking out the firetruck!

A fire-dog upclose!

Next up were Mickey Mouse Clubhouse cupcakes for a special two year old - celebrating his last birthday as an only child as his mom was due with his little sister any day at the time of the party. These actually turned out pretty well - and I was excited that the little guy loved them as I had a hard time coming up with a good idea as my original plan did not work out, so at the last minute had to really improvise with what I had on hand (luckily my baking cupboard while an absolute mess is farily well stocked - if you can find what you are looking for at least :) In any case, I had seen these pictures of thse super cute Mickey Mouse cupcakes online that did not look like they would be all that hard.They looked like the baker just made a Mickey Mouse shape and then dipped in chocolate/black icing and let solidify.  And while I know dipping techniques can be tricky (despite Hello Cupcake making them look super easy :) I way under-estimated this one and also did not have quite the right color icing. BOO. So after both Jeremy and my mom who was down visiting that weekend, asked me if I was making bears - I aborted on trying to make the Mickey shaped heads and tried to find a plan B.  Here are the "bears" as my family put it :)

So since these clearly did not work :(  I was back to the drawing board - or to Google for ideas at least :) Found a really cute idea for the Mickey Mouse Club House cupcakes where they did the pieces of Mickey - like his ears, shoes, and shorts. If you watch Mickey Mouse Club House you might have seen how the house is just that - made up of Mickeys head/ears, shorts and shoes or if you have been to Disney World or maybe even the Disney store lately you may have seen the "Best of Mickey" pattern also just featuring his ears, hands, shoes, shorts on plates and towels. I thought it was pretty cute and since I had the red and yellow fondant on hand (yes I know I don't love using fondant - but desperate times call for desperate measures) I went for it. I used chocolate melts for the ears as I luckily also had them on hand.  They weren't quite what I had originally had in mind - but think they turned out pretty well and helped the little guy celebrate his big day!

Close up of Mickey feet, shorts and ears.

The whole plate of cupcakes just about ready to go to the party!

Well think I can squeeze one more set in here before life gets in the way of posting as usual :) Last but not least, in early October one of my running buddies asked me to make golf cupcakes for her husband's birthday party which was going to be at Top Golf. Not ever making golf cupcakes before, but seeing a really cool set of them in the "What's New, Cupcake" book, I was excited for the opportunity to make them. They actually were faily easy and super fun to make - think the biggest challenge was figuring out how to pack them safely enough that they would make the trip down to Alexandria in one piece. The grass is all icing and the green is a light green sugar on green icing, the rough is a mix of dark and light green sugars and then the sand trap is brown sugar on tan icing. (word was that the sand trap cupcakes were the favorites!). To make sure they would not move en-route I packed in as many cupcakes as would possibly fit into the container and then surrounded them by a bunch of actual golf tees to keep them nice and safe and seemed to do the trick! FORE! 



The 30th whole ready to be played...

All packed up and ready for the party! :)

Okay now that this has taken me just about all day to get together - time to make dinner :) Can you guess what is for dessert?

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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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