Michelle and Martha

Oh yes…and there were cuppycakes!!!!!

Wed, 01 May 2013 01:05:01 -0400

Oh yes…and there were cuppycakes!!!!!

It was a multi-step process…with glitter!!!

Wed, 01 May 2013 01:01:40 -0400

It was a multi-step process…with glitter!!!

Can’t believe it is even there!!! :D

Wed, 01 May 2013 00:58:07 -0400

Can’t believe it is even there!!! :D

#13 Yummy fillers in the middle!!! I was waiting to share this...

Sat, 08 Sep 2012 01:04:00 -0400

#13 Yummy fillers in the middle!!!

I was waiting to share this one because it was a practice round for a cooking competition my boyfriend takes part in. I wanted to show the differences in the two because there were a few changes he wanted to make from Martha’s original recipe. I, personally, loved Martha’s version! The cherry brandy is lightly brushed on the inside of each cupcake and the cream and cherries in the middle balance so well with the rich, luscious, cherry chocolate on top! Mmmmmmm…I wish I had some more right now!

#12 Happy Birthday! Hoot Hoot!

Thu, 05 Jul 2012 21:18:00 -0400

So for my boyfriend’s birthday, I made decorative owl cupcakes! I used the classic buttermilk recipe because it is my boyfriends favorite. Every time I say that I am making cupcakes, he always wants me to make that one. Let’s just say he has slowed down my progress through Martha’s book on more than a few occasions. Hehe!

I did get to try a new decorating style in her book though! the owl eyes are simply twisted pretzels with one side broken off, then half of a stick pretzel for the nose! The almond feathers took the most time. I started around the eyes and worked my way outward. Then I melted chocolate chips and piped the eyes inside the pretzel. That was fun because you get to make each owl looking a different direction!

Needless to say, he loved them!!! Decorating is fun! (That’s his Owl face)

Inspiration

Thu, 28 Jun 2012 19:26:29 -0400

Since my blogs have been scarce I thought I would post a few images of things I’ve seen online that inspire me.

I like this combination of frosting and fondant decorations.

Beautiful color! and I want to try that stitch design on fondant!

_____________________________Simple, elegant, beautiful!__________________________

These are from a shop called Sprinkles. I have actually never been but have put it on my list after hearing about all its popularity!

________________These cupcakes are more for adoration than for eating!________________

While none of these are things from Martha’s book, its always nice to look around at what others are doing and to appreciate and be inspired from them!

I have a long over due blog coming soon!!!

#11 Happy Easter!!!

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 20:12:35 -0400

To celebrate Easter I chose to make cupcakes with birds’ nests on top of them! The cake is Martha’s white cupcake recipe (that I didn’t realize was actually in the book. My mom found it!) and we used the fluffy vanilla frosting.

To make the birds, we dyed the remaining frosting blue and piped them onto the top of an already frosted cupcake. I did not have my tips with me so the birds look a little rough, but you can pipe them pretty easy by just cutting a nice circle out of the corner of a plastic bag.

My mother, who saved me in this project, was the one who did the beaks! I was frustrated that I didn’t have my tips since we needed a leaf one to make the beaks and I had no idea how we were going to do it…My mother pulls out the toothpicks that we needed to put the eyes on and said, “You do the eyes and i’ll do the beaks.” She did a spectacular job with just a toothpick!

The nests we made out of toasted coconut. We put it in the oven at 350 degrees and tossed them around about every 4minutes. I think they turned out very well!

#10 One bowl chocolate batter? ...well I need to make this more challenging!

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 13:19:26 -0400

So I will start with this; There is this lady at my work who always brings in cakes or treats for whoever is having a birthday. Our supervisor’s birthday was coming up and she told her, “I don’t want you to bring anything for my birthday. You do it too much. I appreciate the thought, but I don’t want you putting yourself out for me.” So…secretly…behind her back…she sneaks over to me and says, “Hey, if I bring something small and you bring something small…then it won’t seems as bad like I did everything. Wanna help?” So I said yes!

These are the One Bowl Chocolate cupcakes recipe from Martha’s book and it was actually extremely simple! I taste tested one when it came out of the oven and I would like to advise you all…that is the BEST time to eat them!!! They are so warm and fresh and…well…there is just something about home made chocolate cake versus the kind you buy at the store or in a box mix. here is something so much more pure about it’s flavor.

Here they are! I frosted them with Martha’s Fluffy Vanilla frosting and then decided I needed to make them pretty.

For the decorative top, what I did was dye some of the frosting yellow and some orange. I used the petal style pipe (the same one I used on blog #8 for the sweet pea flowers) and I just tried my best to go in a circle and then I added chocolate sprinkles for the centers.

This project was very fun! And my coworker , who brought lemon rum cake, cookies, and a large cake for our supervisor to take home, was very impressed with my contribution!

#9 Pumpkin spice and everything nice!

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 03:13:03 -0400

I am SO EXCITED for the fall season!!! I made these pumpkin spice cupcakes for a “pre-thanksgiving dinner” with some friends.

The batter uses all of the best spices! Cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, and….something else, I forget. It also uses pumpkin puree, which I think helps make it so moist! They baked very well and were very light and fluffy.

I made the cream cheese frosting for these which worked perfectly with the cupcakes.

the decoration, however, was made from marzipan. I kneaded it and split it in two parts, one larger than the other. Dyed the bigger part orange and kneaded the color in, and the same for the green.

I rolled the orange into small balls, poked the top with a toothpick, and made the lines on the sides with a butter knife. The only tricky part is you have to keep cleaning the knife or your hands because it starts to stick and tear.

To make the stems, I mixed a little orange with the green and rolled it out very thin. Then I just kind of cut a small piece and arranged it on top of the pumpkin to look like a stem. Some were short and some were long and curly. It was fun to be creative like that!

#8 Decorating Time!

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 02:04:34 -0400

This was back in August (To show you how far behind I am in my posts) for my friend’s daughter’s birthday. She was turning 7 and was having a tea party for her birthday. I showed my friend the book and she pointed to the piped flower decorations. I thought I could at least try it. So I told her I would.

I used the basic buttermilk recipe with the fluffy white frosting, only I made sure to smooth the frosting on the tops so the flowers would lay nicely. I took some of the remaining frosting and split it into bowls, just kind of guessing how much I thought I would need for blue pansy flowers, pink sweet pea flowers, and green for the stems. Martha suggested to use gel dye coloring and I highly recommend it! It was so much more manageable than the drops! I grew up using the liquid drops but I feel I had a better handle with the gel.

After dying the frosting I attempted my first flower, the pansy. My boyfriend can attest to this…I screwed it up. The second one….terrible. So, as I always do, I started to panic. It was just a short time before the party and I could not get how to make these flowers! I was trying my best to follow Martha’s description holding the pipe with the right shaped tip at a certain angle, and slowly rotating the cupcake, but…they were just blue blobs on green sticks.

Finally, and I have no idea how it happened, I got one right! I was so please I am pretty sure I did a little jig right there in the kitchen! With my spirits high I tried to perfect a few more and then moved on to the sweet peas.

I suppose once I made that cosmic connection with the confectionary floral realm, all flowers came to me with ease! I don’t think I had a single sweet pea that was considered unsatisfactory for presenting! So I took them to the party and they were a great addition to a lovely outdoor tea party!

#7 ...Rhubarb? Are you sure???

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 01:53:07 -0400

Due to my lack of constant funds, I have tried to reduce my baking to a need-only basis. So if there is a party, birthday, holiday, some sort of need for sweets. then I will bake them!

So my boyfriends friend was coming to visit all the way from China. Since China seems like a good enough reason I offered to bake him something. “Yes please do, he loves to eat!” My boyfriend says. “But you have to find the most bizarre recipe you can in that book. He loves to try new and strange things.” Ok…So I flipped through and came across the rhubarb recipe. “I have kind of been wanting to try these but I am kinda nervous.” “THEY’RE PERFECT!”

So I went to the farmer’s market near my apartment that always has really great, fresh, yet cheap produce (since the stuff I saw at the store did not look too great). All I knew about rhubarb was that it was red celery and it was sometimes put in pie but I had never baked with it before.

The batter was a light simple recipe and you added small chopped pieces of the rhubarb in it. Then it had a whipped cream topping (that I did right this time!) and a rhubarb glaze on top. When I was making the glaze my boyfriend and his friend were there. We were just chatting and they were catching up while I worked on it, but I was so nervous! The whole time I was thinking, “Oh man…what if this isn’t right? What if this liquid doesn’t turn into syrup?! What he hates rhubarb?!?!” But I eventually calmed myself down and served him the first one.

He liked them a lot! He had to have a second one!

#6 Baked Banana

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 01:42:34 -0400

So my old roommate one day comes up to me and says, “So my friend at work is having a baby shower this week and I was wondering if you wanted to make cupcakes for her??? It’s monkey themed so maybe….Bananas???”

So I took the challenge on and made these baked banana cupcakes from Martha’s book.

Baking the bananas was sort of odd. you left the peels on…they looked like this when they were done.

They were squishy inside and the peels just came right off!

I made these ones mini cupcakes and they turned out quite good! The ladies at her work said they, “tasted just like banana pancakes but with frosting and in cupcake form!”

#5 Nutter Butter!!!

Mon, 05 Sep 2011 18:36:11 -0400

So, don’t tell Martha….but I made cupcakes that were not from her book! One of my friends got this recipe for a nutter butter cupcake that sounded so wonderful that we had to try it out! It was very simple too so for people that are nervous to make things from scratch this one still uses a box mix but then adds things to it and puts it together in such a unique and wonderful way!

I believe we used a dark chocolate cake mix (Renee when you read this you’ll have to correct me if I’m wrong, its been a while since we made this) and I can’t remember if we added peanut butter to the batter but I’m sure that wouldn’t hurt it! We also added crunched up nutter butter cookies to the batter! Before we poured them into the pan, we place half a nutter butter cookie at the bottom of each!

Then my favorite part was the frosting! we had two kinds; a rich chocolate one, and a peanut butter one - which is just peanut butter, butter, and powdered sugar. After we baked the cupcakes and let them cool some, we put the two frostings in separate plastic bags, and snipped one corner of each. My friend showed me how to do this first; the peanut butter frosting was so rich and thick that you could pipe it out onto the cupcake and sort of swirl it around leaving a well in the middle. Then you took the chocolate frosting and filled the well with it. So it looked like this…

Then you took half a nutter butter cookie and stuck it in the chocolate part of the frosting so it stuck straight up on the top of the cupcake. It was so very delicious! If anyone is a peanut butter fan feel free to ask me for the recipe!

#4 Blueberry & Whipped Cream

Mon, 05 Sep 2011 18:32:05 -0400

Sorry it has been so long since I’ve posted but not to worry! I have definitely been baking plenty in that time so get ready for a massive amount of blogs coming very soon!

Back in July I made the Blueberry and cream cupcakes that were one of the first recipes that I feel like I flopped. I am such a big fan of blueberries but these were kinda off. They seemed too soggy to me because the blueberries burst inside the cupcakes and they were so juicy that it kinda soaked the bottom and that bothered me.

I took this picture of them in the early morning so it came out kind of dark…

The frosting to go with this cupcake was actually whipped cream. I thought that would taste very lovely together! But I had some issues with the cream and it wouldn’t hold up to make it for the time when people were actually going to be eating cupcakes at my work. So, out of panic and frustration, I ran to the store before work and bought a couple cans of whipped cream…

Everyone at work said they tasted good but I knew they were definitely not in my top 5 or anything. I guess since I only have 4 blogs on here it has to be in my top 4! But just a sneak preview, there are much better ones coming up!

#3 Buttermilk

Wed, 06 Jul 2011 20:23:21 -0400

Ok, sorry that it has been so long since I posted anything on here. My laptop is getting old and heats up and then shuts itself off so that has made things complicated. I have written this post probably about three times now so I am finally being smart and writing it on word first so in case my laptop shuts off again, it will hold on to this document.

So not this last Wednesday but two Wednesdays ago, I had some friends from out of town visiting. I thought what a better time than this to bake cupcakes! We made the buttermilk cupcakes with Fluffy white frosting. It turned out very well! My friend Jenny had decided to be my assistant. She was a great help! I usually wait to preheat the oven because all of the steps take a while and the kitchen just gets really hot too soon. But this time I almost didn’t turn it on soon enough! We got through all the steps pretty quickly! My friend was doing the dry mix and I was doing the wet, we mixed them together and we’re ready to bake!

She also introduced me to something really great. Powdered buttermilk! The last time I baked with buttermilk it was such a hassle and they only had one size so I had to buy it and the rest spoiled before I could use it again. This stuff is great because It doesn’t smell and I a pretty sure it doesn’t expire, at least not as fast as actual buttermilk. You just follow the directions for how much you need and then add a certain amount of water and there you have it!

The fluffy white frosting was very simple…but very fattening! All you put into it is butter (lots of butter), powdered sugar, and a tiny bit of vanilla. It turned out great and delicious! The only thing that bothered me a bit was the sprinkles. In Martha’s picture she has cute little sprinkles on top of her cupcakes. Perhaps we let them sit too long before doing this, but when we tried to put sprinkles on ours, the frosting had sort of hardened and they all rolled right off the top! Who needs sprinkles anyways?

We made mini-sized cupcakes too! Thanks to my friend pictured above who bought me a mini cupcake pan!

#2 Carrot Cake

Wed, 15 Jun 2011 20:47:16 -0400

I considered skipping this one initially since I don’t like carrot cake, but after the protest of some friends I decided to go along and do it for them and for Martha. I have only tried carrot cake a few times, and it usually has long stringy pieces of carrots that don’t taste cooked enough. This is most likely what has turned me off about carrot cake. So, in an attempt to make them more likeable for myself I chopped them very very fine.

A few things that turned me off about this recipe was obviously the presence of vegetables among sweet baked goods, but also the massive amounts of oil it called for. Thinking about it now, I suppose if it called for the same amount but in butter I might not be as grossed out. Once I poured the oil into the carrot mixture, this was before any dry ingredients mind you, It just wasn’t an appetizing sight…Moving on so as not to gross anyone out…

The mixture was a bit thinner than I had anticipated. I put the first batch in the oven and when I pulled them out, they seemed done but over time they quickly deflated on the top a bit. Just enough to leave a little gooey dip on the middle. I freaked out a little when I saw it so my friend and I cut one in half to check but the bottom and center were cooked all the way through. The second batch turned out great, no gooey dips!

The frosting was very simple to make and tasted wonderful!!! Who knew cream cheese frosting could be so easy to make? I guess I’m just still new at this whole homemade frosting thing. I love the touch of vanilla the recipe calls for because it is such a great addition to the cream cheese and confectioner’s sugar flavors!

Overall, my friends said that the cupcakes tasted light and less spiced; not heavy and thick like most carrot cakes are. I did work up the courage to try one, and thankfully no undercooked carrots! The spices and the carrots worked really well with each other, it was a very nice balance!

#1 Chocolate chip cupcake

Sat, 11 Jun 2011 23:24:35 -0400

Yesterday I attempted the first cupcake in Martha’s book, the chocolate chip. Seems easy enough, I thought. Several things were brought to my attention throughout the process of making these cupcakes:

It has been a very long time since I have baked a cake/cupcake from scratch. I realized that I had turned into the insta-baker, where all you need is a couple eggs, water, oil, and a box. I quickly humbled myself, stopped complaining about how complicated it was, and began to appreciate making something original. There were no pre-processed boxes, no simple three step directions. There was me, Martha’s book, and all the raw isolated ingredients. I felt much more natural this way and quickly enjoyed the challenge of making something delicious out of the cluster of items on my countertop.

I learned something LIFE CHANGING from Martha in the process of baking. When putting chocolate chips in a cake/cupcake, if you toss them in a bit of flour before adding them to the batter, they will not all sink to the bottom of the pan! This concept was completely new to me! I usually avoided chocolate chips in similar baking projects for this exact reason! I could never keep them spread around the batter well enough. After reading this piece of advice, I stood silently for a moment, not moving, with my jaw slightly dropped. After excitedly telling my boyfriend this marvelous information, he shrugged and said, “Oh yeah, I knew that.”

Initially I was concerned about making frosting from scratch. It was actually very simple. In the book, it called for some fancy-shmancy dutch cocoa, but I couldn’t find it at the store so I just bought Hershey’s instead. I didn’t know it was so simple to make frosting. I made chocolate frosting as was recommended to pair with these cupcakes and it turned out quite nice! The only thing that surprised me was that it didn’t stiffen the way frosting does that you buy at the store. It kept a very nice gloss to it the whole night and even on to today. Also, either I did not frost my cupcakes heavily enough or the recipes just don’t match each other’s size, but I had a lot of frosting leftover.

So, overall the cupcakes turned out really good! I am surprised at how the quality of the cake is so much better than any box mix you could ever buy! It is so light and perfectly sweet! Now to critique myself a bit, I would say that I might have goofed a bit on my measurements and mine were a tad bit too floury, but I’m sure I will get better at it with time. I do have 174 times to try again!