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| My girl's 6 and here's the cupcakes I've made for her bday party! |
Here’s a quick post about getting a fast fix of sugary chocolatey goodness by baking a really yummy one-bowl chocolate cupcake. I used Martha Stewart’s One Bowl Chocolate Cupcake recipe from her Cupcakes book.
The verdict? Yes, it’s quick and easy and you can do it all in one bowl. I like that. In addition, you don’t have to worry about softening butter. It uses veggie oil. That helps for moistness too.
I swirled some vanilla bean Swiss Meringue Buttercream on my mini chocolate cupcakes and then decided to get fancy with a variegated pink buttercream. I just plopped pink and white buttercream blobs in my piping bag and it came out looking all swirly pink. It’s kind of neat. It looks fancy but it’s quick and easy too.
The buttercream is so smooth and delicious I don’t know if I can ever go back to a simple confectioners’ sugar & butter concoction again! It rivals my favourite Beranbaum buttercreams which use a sugar syrup method or a boiled sugar and corn syrup method. At least the Swiss Meringue method doesn’t require you to boil sugar. My only pet peeve is all those egg yolks I have left over…and yes, I do know what I can do with all those egg yolks (pastry cream, creme brulee etc.) but you know how I like things all neat and tidy!
, Ina Garten. 
recipe, I found the flavour okay but it certainly didn’t beat out Garten’s recipe. I found the Garten recipe superior in ease of technique and less fussy as you didn’t have to use as many eggs (nor did you have to separate and save 4 whites from the extra yolks you needed). For the extra richness the yolks added to the Corriher recipe, I didn’t find the cupcake any more flavourful. For some strange reason, I also found little pockets of unmixed flour in the baked cupcakes, which is my ultimate pet peeve. I had sifted the dry ingredients so that shouldn’t have happened. I had followed the directions carefully, so I wasn’t happy. Initially, I thought that the technique of adding the flour into the warm hot cocoa mixture was the problem, but I’m not too sure. In any case, it wasn’t a foolproof recipe and it didn’t work out for me. 
, “American Classics 2009”)chocolate butterflies
if you can’t draw a butterfly to save your life, just locate some line drawings and trace them through the parchment. No pencils necessary!
Yes, it’s been a long time since I’ve posted. I have holidayed in Seattle and come back and I’ve made many cakes that I have yet to write about. I purchased way too much cool stuff at Mrs. Cook’s and Sur La Table but all I can say is at least I’m doing my bit to help the economy.
Though travelling is way more fun now that we have a larger (and brand new) vehicle with dvd players in the headrests, I caution you not to get these things unless you’re sure your kids don’t get car-sick watching t.v. Bebe threw up on the way back up to the Canadian border. Fortunately, I had stored the potty right between the kids in the back seat because there was no room in the trunk. I heard a cough…followed by the wet belch. Immediately, my motherly instincts took over and I grabbed the potty and swung it under her mouth just in time. yuck. At least, after cleaning up and freshening up at a rest stop, Bebe slept the rest of the way home and that helped alleviate the usual painfully loud banter and petty fights between the two kids.
I realize I’ll never top Bebe’s 5th birthday cake: Ariel’s Underwater Castle. It was a multi-dayed project that resulted in a lot of oohs and ahs, but I didn’t feel that her 6th would warrant such a large cake. For one, only having 6 girls at a ceramics studio means not much cake is going to be eaten. I decided upon cupcakes instead. Bebe’s into butterflies so I thought I’d make her some chocolate ones to decorate the cupcakes. Since pink is her colour of choice, I have pink bodies surrounded by a chocolate-brown outline. This colour scheme mimics the chocolate cake and pink buttercream too.
After lining an upside down sheet pan with parchment and securing it on one side, I slid a sheet of butterfly patterns underneath the parchment. I chose to just do wings and opted to leave the antennae out. If you want anatomically correct butterflies, go ahead and pipe a pair of antennae in chocolate for each pair of wings you make. I find them way too tiny to deal with to bother. After finishing the sheet of images, I just kept sliding the template over to create more butterfly images. I set my chocolate over a heating pad set on low heat to keep it from hardening too quickly. I find it easier than a pan of hot water. The only problem I encountered: air bubbles in the chocolate as it cooled. You have to pipe pretty fast. The air bubbles ruin your ability to make thin, even lines.
When the chocolate outlines harden, you can fill a piping bag with another colour of chocolate (tint white chocolate using a gel paste or powdered food colouring or use coloured candy melts). The wings have to dry completely and after they do, you can carefully peel them off to use them. If you make a whole bunch and want to store them, I’d advise you just leave them stuck onto the parchment. I cut my chocolate butterfly-adorned parchment into small squares and stored them in layers in a plastic container.
You can use the chocolate butterfly outlines to decorate your cupcakes too. You just have to handle them very carefully as they break if you jostle them or even breathe on them. As well, you may want to wear gloves because you may melt them or leave fingerprints. I have cool hands so I just worked quickly. The ones I ruined, well, I just swore and them popped them in my mouth. It’s all good. Let it go.
Not willing to leave well enough alone, I decided to make little fondant flowers and plopped those on the cupcakes too. Check out the Castle Cake (Part 1) for instructions on how to make fondant flowers.
I found that setting the wings into the freshly piped buttercream to be the easiest way to set them into “butterfly form”. Since I didn’t make antennae I also didn’t bother with the bodies (which you could pipe in with buttercream I suppose. I figured there was enough buttercream there to hold the wings in place. Check out this post for a quick and easy recipe for buttercream.
If you place the wings just so, you could squish the buttercream a bit to look like a body anyway. I felt that after peeling the chocolate butterflies off of the parchment, the flat side of the chocolate that touched the parchment created a less bumpy appearance and so I used that for the top sides of the butterflies.
Looking at the simple and elegant chocolate butterfly outline over the filled in outline, I think the outline looks way more classy and I like them better. Plus, they’re way faster to make!
I placed the cupcakes on a cupcake display and stuck a pink Wilton card-holder pick with Bebe’s birthday greeting on the specially decorated top cupcake. I decorated the circular scalloped card with pink rhinestones and made sure everything was sparkling with pink sprinkles and dragees. With two girls, I now know how to kick up the girlie factor. The cupcakes earned some special longing gazes in the build-up time before the birthday song.
Now that I’ve done birthday cupcakes instead of the big honking cakes of yore, I’m liking it. None of the kids really eat any of the big cakes anyway…most of it usually ends up in the trash and they go off running to play after a few bites. At a kid’s birthday there has to be cake, I know, but having gone to dozens of kids’ birthday parties by now, I’ve noted how little cake is eaten by the kids. It’s all about the cake topper and the singing of the song and the blowing out of the candle. Another thing I like about cupcakes: no need for cutting! I also brought along Chinese takeout containers so the girls could take home any leftover cupcakes to their siblings or parents. Less mess, less hassle and way less work! I think I’m converting to birthday cupcakes from now on! I’ll be thinking of how to make edible birthday cupcake toppers and how to add more bling to cupcakes. I’ve decided to keep a sketch book for future cupcake designs, edible toppers and flavour combinations. What a revelation! It’s going to be fun!
Have you ever swum in a pile of freshly fallen cherry blossoms?
I took 2 of these trays to the potluck
What's with the bird? 
Since the Parks Board decided to top the trees, the city is way more visible than before. In fact, none of these buildings could be seen before. All you could see were the mountains.
The North Shore mountains in the background, Burrard Inlet and just peeking behind the tree tops is Science World (the glass ball).
Downtown Vancouver with its skyscrapers and in near the bottom centre, BC Place Stadium (with its puffy white roof)
In this pic (above) I aimed the lens towards East Vancouver, where I grew up. Beyond is Burnaby.
I grew up in a waterfront house which was perched on a cliff in the East Side, overlooking the North Shore mountains. We could hear tug boats lowing and trains shunting; we could smell salt air from the Burrard Inlet and see seagulls and eagles on a daily basis. On a clear day in the winter, with binoculars, you could see little people skiing down Grouse Mountain...and even make out the colours they were wearing! To the west, you could see the downtown waterfront. I miss that environment and don't think I'll ever forget the sensory beauty of living near the sea.
Do come and visit! We have great food too!
The Cherry Blossom Cupcakes were frosted with a Wilton 1M tip.
the cupcakes were so tiny you could pop one in your mouth...fleeting beauty and joy...much like Cherry Blossoms. 
