Happy Birthday Tianna & Matt!

So Wednesday was my sister's birthday. Apparently she was feeling the pressure of one of those "My Super Sweet 16" feuds, even though she was only turning 14. One of the girls in her class who's birthday is three days after hers was boasting about having mini cupcakes and cookies or something, so Tianna asked me to make some of MY cupcakes. Oh yes, they had a throwdown.

I've never gone all out for this particular little sister's birthday before, so I decided this would be the year that I made it super special, and I agreed to take on her battle. She wanted red velvets and vanilla. I've never been a huge fan of vanilla--too boring--but I've always thought that vanilla can be amazingly supplemented by a killer frosting. So there was my game plan: red velvet cupcakes with cream cheese frosting and vanilla frosting with strawberry cream cheese frosting. These babies took three days to make.

PS. It also happened to be my friend Matt's birthday the day after Tianna's so I made some for him too.

DAY 1: chocolate design piping

Dark chocolate and white chocolate, melted down, & piped through plastic bags onto a cold cookie sheet; pretty stuff for something so simple. I made a couple march 26s and 25s, names, ages, happy birthdays. I had to do it really fast though because the chocolate kept hardening inside the bag and chunks would clog the tip. I also made a few for Uyen and JN.

DAY 2: baking
yummy red velvet batter // generic cupcake liners FAIL

I love baking cakes now that I have an electric hand mixer. It's so much easier. I mean sure, it gets a little heavy on the wrists, but it sure beats using a whisk and mixing it manually. Frosting is a lot easier to make with it now too. Thank you Chris!

PS. Don't buy generic cupcake liners. Haha. You end up with half cupcake liners in the middle of your stack, completely out of nowhere...cheapos.

vanilla cupcakes go into the oven // i got a pretty box for the cupcakes too

leftover batter was used for mini cupcakes!

They look like condiments before they're baked! Wanna know why? I might've taken the cups from In N Out. Maybe.

DAY 3: frosting & decorating





Strawberry Cream Cheese Frosting!

I've never successfully made frosting...until this time. It always came out really runny or more like icing. It actually STAYED creamy this time! Funny, because I didn't actually go by a recipe this time! After reading up on different recipes online, I kind of just adlibbed what to put into the mixing bowl and ta-da! Strawberry frosting came out amazing. I used real strawberries, pureed and strained so that the frosting wouldn't be seedy.

Oh snap. She delivers too??


Casualties of Baking
aka BROKEN CHOCOLATE PIECES =/

So overall how would I rate this adventure? I definitely put a lot of time and effort into it, and it was definitely a great relief of stress and tension that I had built up from Finals week last week. I loved it. I put my all into them.

Any interesting tales?
Well, I went looking for migrant workers selling strawberries on the street and we didn't stop until the 2nd or 3rd person because the first person didn't look like the type that would be willing to bargain. I only had $7, but they wanted $8. I ended up paying that last dollar in quarters...because I fail at bargaining.

My sister's friends asked her if I had BOUGHT the PREMADE MIX from Sprinkles in Palo Alto. Oh HELLS NO! Baby, these were home-made and NOT available at a store near you. Hahaha. It was quite the compliment. Tianna also told me that the teachers raved about my strawberry frosting. I'm totally flattered by how well they were received at her school. WIN!

I'll definitely be making these again and maybe even different flavors of frosting. I think I've finally conquered frosting. Yay!

Sprinkles Cupcakes

So today a few of my friends and I headed up to Palo Alto and stopped by Sprinkles Cupcakes. Now, if you haven't already heard of Sprinkles, it started up this whole gourmet cupcakes craze down in Beverly Hills, and, by word of mouth and media exposure of celebrity fanatics like Katie Holmes and the Girls Next Door, eventually grew into a huge trend, spurring the opening of many other mini-cake hot spots.

I've always been a cupcake fanatic. Not a huge fan of frosting, so the idea of a piece of cake with LESS frosting than a slice of cake from a whole cake is great to me...PLUS they're so damn cute! After hearing about this place, I was determined to head down to Bev Hills and try them out. Lucky for me, they opened one up in NorCal and the Husby drove a bunch of us up there today.

Welcome to Sprinkles Palo Alto.

They make certain flavors on certain days and display them behind a plexi glass as you walk in the door. I was kinda surprised by how small they were though. In pictures, I imagined they were a lot bigger, maybe because I heard how much they costed. Alas, they were just the same size as your average cupcake.

They told me to do the honors of opening the box.

Altoghether we bought 6 for about $20. One "Black & White", which is a chocolate cake with white frosting, one Red Velvet (your regular red cocoa with vanilla frosting), three Mochas, and a Banana Dark Chocolate for me.

Kurt & Ann had the Mocha cupcakes,
JN with his Red Velvet, and Christine about to dig into her Black & White


Banana Dark Chocolate
yellow & light blue "nipple" haha

Sprinkles Cupcakes tend to have a signature "button" on top. I like to call it a cupcake nipple. At first I thought it was fondant and would be really soft, but really, it's kind of gross. It's a really hard piece of candy that takes forever to crunch down in your mouth. I bit half of it and threw the other half away...

At $3.25 per cupcake or $36 for a dozen, they're not exactly the kind of everyday snack for the average wallet-ed Joe Schmoe, but I gotta say, they were pretty damn good. As a curious cupcake aficionado, I didn't mind shelling out the money for one. Mine was a banana cake with dark chocolate frosting.

Okay, so did I think they were worth $3.25? Not really. It tasted really good, the cake was really moist and had a really good flavor to it, the frosting was thick but not too overwhelmingly sweet, but I don't think it's worth upwards of $3! Not gonna lie, they were really good--definitely miles up from your regular Safeway/Costco cupcakes and completely deserving of being called "gourmet". It's a nice once in a while kind of thing or for a special occasion, but I think it's a little stupid to spend that much on a little cupcake...

Sprinkles, you taste amazing, but unfortunately, I wouldn't be able to afford your indulgence very often at your prices... Thank God there isn't one in Sac. After trying an authentically "gourmet" cupcake, I can understand the hype. The cupcakes at my work are nothing in comparison and do not deserve to be called gourmet if having the title "gourmet" puts them on the same level as Sprinkles. Maybe we should call them "semi-gourmet"? Now that I've tried Sprinkles, my next venture will be Kara's. I didn't wanna try those first because I wanted to base my judgement after having the original, and now that I've tried Sprinkles, I'm ready to critique the rest. Kara's, you better be ready for me.

UglyDoll Cupcakes!

So basically UglyDolls are these awkwardly ugly monsters that look like I could've drawn them in Kindergarten, except they're awkwardly REALLY adorable and cute, so their plush stuffed animals are really over priced. Like, a 14 inch one is probably around $25. It's an urban thing I think... Anyways, I decided to decorate a bunch of cupcakes with their faces on them! Here goes:

All 12 that I made.

wedgehead & wage


uglyworm & uglydog


puglee & plunko


ox & moxy


icebat & chuckanucka


bop n beep


and then I ran out of ideas and got tired of UglyDolls
so I made a Pikachu!


When I got really lazy, I did some suuuuuper plain hearts & flowers.


...had to finish them off with my name!

The cupcakes were my 'half scratch half box' cake recipe for devils food chocolate cake and red velvet cake.

Frosting was also homemade, just your basic egg whites, lemon juice, & powdered sugar recipe, plus food coloring for whatever colors I needed. I used the flooding technique for the colored icing and I used melted white chocolate to frame it. The eyes were upside down white chocolate chips and the mouths, eyes, and anything "black" was just melted down baking chocolate.


Victoria and I randomly decided to make cupcakes one night out of nowhere, so we went to Walmart at freakin 10pm after our PAPhi fundraiser at Guad's. We basically finished up with the baking at around midnight and didn't finish decorating until 4am. Anyways, 4am cupcakes were well worth it. It was a ton of fun, and I only had a quiz at 7:30 am the next day anyway so it didn't matter right?

...I didn't show up for class and ended up makign it up at another discussion section.

Overall, I loved it. UglyDolls + Cupcakes = UGLYCUPCAKES!

New Years 2009 Cupcakes

chocolate andes mint cupcakes
creamed cheese frosting
garnish: black & white chocolate piped designs

the plain cupcakes... pre-decorating
I even jacked a donut box from Safeway to make it look legit.

design piping
took a cold cookie sheet and just piped melted chocolate onto it

martini glasses, champagne glasses and fireworks designs


frosting timeeee!

yay the finished products
the family was quite impressed

This was basically my first time attempting "fashionable" cupcakes. I think it turned out quite well. Piping was REALLY hard at first but then I got the hang of it and it's kind of fun actually! I think it gives the cupcakes something extra special. What's really hard is keeping them from breaking after they were solid... They're so freakin fragile! I broke so many martini glasses and "2009"s... Ahhhh. Well worth the effort though. Definite success for my first attempt at this style of decorating though.

Future Goal: Cake decorating class so I can learn to pipe!