Hello Cupcakes!! 

On my other blogs, I focused on the cupcakes and frosting designs. However, this time, I decided to make homemade vanilla buttercream frosting. Making frosting is much more simple than I thought it would be. Anyways, thanks to page 227 from the book Hello Cupcakes by Karen Tack and Alan Richardson I got a recipe for the frosting. 

The ingredients you'll need are ;

1 container (16 ounces) Marshmallow Fluff

3 sticks unsalted butter, softened and cut into 1-inch pieces

1 teaspoon vanilla extract 

1/2 cup confectioners sugar, plus addition if needed

I actually didn't have marshmallow fluff at home, so all I did was add an extra 2 cups of powdered sugar into the recipe, and I added a tablespoon of milk. The steps to making the frosting were pretty simple. Page 227 tells us "Spoon the Marshmallow Fluff into a large bowl. Beat with an electric mixer on low. Gradually add the butter pieces, beating well after each addition, until smooth. Add vanilla extract and the 1/2 cup confectioners sugar. Scrape the bowl well to incorporate. Add more confectioners sugar, if necessary, to adjust the texture." 

When I mixed the sugar and butter together, it was very clumpy and I thought I messed it up, so if that happens dont worry about it because once i added some milk, it turned out smooth and creamy. Just keep on mixing it until it's not clumpy. If your frosting is too thick, add some milk, but if it's too thin then add more powdered sugar. At the end I added a pinch of salt to cut out the sweetness. 

Here is the finished frosting, it was very smooth and it was 100% times better than store-bought frosting because it didn't have that cloying sweetness, and it just tasted better. If you ever make cupcakes and you have all of these ingredients at home, you should make frosting because it's much more delicious. 

Hopefully your frosting looked like this as your finished product. 

To go along with the frosting I decided to bake a cake, after it was done I spread the frosting on top and cut up some strawberries. It doesn't look as good as a cake from the store but it sure did taste better. 

Thank you for reading my blog posts, it was a fun ride, and it made me expand on my creativity. I hope you learned something from my posts. Thank you!

What's your favorite type of frosting? Do you think you'll make your own sometime? 

Richardson, Alan, and Karen Tack. Hello, Cupcake! Houghton Mifflin, 2009. 

Hello Cupcakes!!

My previous blogs had everything you can imagine about doing cupcakes. I taught you guys how to frost, and how to properly fill the cupcake pan with batter in order to get the best cupcakes. However, this time, I wanted this blog to be more creative. 

Today, I am going to frost designs on my cupcakes to make them more appealing. I don't know about you, but when I'm at a party and I see cupcakes, I always choose the ones that are very creative because they look more appetizing.  

First off, I started by baking some fresh and delicious cupcakes. I made a regular vanilla recipe cupcake batter but I added two handfuls of sprinkles and they looked so pretty after they baked. 

Inspired by the book Hello Cupcakes by Karen Tack and Alan Richardson, I decided to create petal like designs from frosting on my cupcakes. Trying to recreate light pink flower petals, I put strawberry syrup in the frosting before adding it to a Ziploc bag. I had to cut out a specific shape in the corner of the bag in order to achieve a petal like design. As you can tell by the picture below, you have to cut the corner into a v-shape in order to achieve that design. 

On page 14 of Hello Cupcakes it said, "Starting off the perimeter of the cupcake, place the tip flat on the surface of the cupcakes. Squeeze the bag, pulling away from the center of the cupcake. Use small side-to-side pushes or wiggles to make the leaf or petal shape. Work toward the center in concentric circles, overlapping the patter slightly." Now, honestly, this took me a couple of tries because the pattern isn't that easy to achieve. What helped me was putting the bag with the frosting in the freezer for 30 minutes so that it's firm. Then I piped the frosting on carefully and patiently, it'll take precision. 

Here is my finished product. Light pink petals piped on the cupcake. It isn't that good but hey I'm not a professional, and I hope you guys are learning along with me. It was fun to make, but it also came with patience. 

What is the most creative design you've seen on a cupcake? 

Richardson, Alan, and Karen Tack. Hello, Cupcake! Houghton Mifflin, 2009.

Frosting Cupcake Techniques

Frosting the Cupcake

There are many different ways to frost a cupcake, and I know known. I have always loved the way people put art onto food, and it is time that I too become a food artist. On the side bar of page 211, in the book "The Williams-Sonoma Baking Book:Essential Recipes for Today's Home Baker", it gives you some tips on how to ice a cupcake with the frosting recipe in the page next to it (tried out the recipe earlier). 

What I first did was I filled up a pastry bag with the frosting and made sure to twist the top of the bag so none of the frosting would leak out as I was squeezing the bag. There are many different types of the pointers that direct the frosting

on the cupcake. On the first cupcake, I did a typical swirl and made little flowers/dots of frosting with the pointers.

I used two different sizes of the same shaped pointer, as shown on the left. On the right we can see the difference between both outcomes. Even though you can cover much more surface using the larger sized hole, I believe the smaller one gives you more control, as said in the book, for more control and smaller chance of a mistake,  use the smaller sized pointer (p 211). I also decided to have more fun with the frosting, and added some food coloring into the frosting and squeezed on a fresh cupcake. The first one turned out okay, but I love the second one I made (bottom
 left). The color mixed very well with the white frosting and made the color softer. I decided to make more designs on the other cupcakes with the white frosting and found the cupcakes more appealing, but I do need much more practice on frosting cupcakes, or making designs on them. 

 Have you ever thought about the skill that goes into the appearance of food? Do you think you will ever make some designs the next time you frost some cupcakes? 

Making the Frosting

Vanilla Frosting

Frosting is a key element to cupcakes and other baked good like cupcakes. I am most comfortable using store bought frosting, one reason because its much easier than whipping some up. But on my journey through the baking world, I have realized how important frosting really is, so I decided to use a recipe and make some homemade frosting. The recipe, on the side bar of page 210 in the book "The Williams-Sonoma Baking Book, the Essential Recipe Collection for Today's Home Baker", requires:

• 1 cup of milk
• 2 tbsp all-purpose flour
• 1 cup butter, room temperature
• 1 cup white sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

I whisked the milk into the flour in a small bowl until it turned smooth, so that it'll thicken. While I was doing this, I missed a key step. "Heat and stir until it boils and thickens" (210). Because of this, my frosting did not turn out as intended, but I continued on. I beat the butter and added in the milk mixture and continued to beat it in. This is when my mistake is clearly represented. I was not able to reach my goal and my outcome showed it. Because the milk was not mixing in with the butter mixture, I drained it and added 6 tbsp of flour and sugar, and managed to get it to stick together. 


In the end, I learned that patience and attention is a key factor in baking, because of the severe consequences it could lead to if you miss a single step. 

Have you ever missed a step while cooking and ended up with a bad outcome? What approach did you take to solve it, or did you start over? 

Hello cupcakes!

It is a couple days after Christmas, and no matter how much food I ate over the holidays, I am still always hungry for cupcakes. When my family got together on Christmas Eve, there were lots of sweets like cakes, and pastries, and candies, but I was still longing the taste of cupcakes because they are my favorite comfort dessert. To fulfill my craving for cupcakes I baked some delicious, chocolate ones.

In my last blog, I did a simple frosting coating on the cupcakes with a spatula. This time, I decided to actually pipe the frosting on. Now, here's a life hack; since we all have Ziploc bags at home instead of piping bags with frosting tips, we can use them to pipe the frosting on. Luckily, the book Hello Cupcake! by Karen Tack & Alan Richardson gave me tips for this life hack method. On page 13, they tell us how to properly fill a Ziploc bag in order to be able to frost cupcakes, "To fill the ziplock, hold the bottom of the bag inside out over your hand. Using a spatula, fill the area of the bag inside your hand. Lift the edges of the bag up and around the frosting, press out the excess air, and seal the bag. Grasp the bag by the zippered edge and squeeze the frosting down to one corner." I used these helpful hints and then I cut a hole in the corner with scissors to create a frosting tip.

And then, I used this Ziploc piping bag to pipe the frosting on my cupcakes. This life hack was so helpful because I don't have piping bags with different frosting tips, but I love baking cupcakes and I want to make them look good, so using a Ziploc bag instead is very useful. 

I did a basic design on my cupcakes, but we're just getting started! Just wait until my next blog post, I'll be using frosting to make decorations and designs on cupcakes, stay tuned! 

What was the most useful life hack you've used? And do you think you will try this one out? 

Richardson, Alan, and Karen Tack. Hello, Cupcake! Houghton Mifflin, 2009.

Hello Cupcakes!

I love to bake when I have free time so I made some cupcakes. Baking is a fun hobby because you have fun making the food and then you feel proud of yourself for actually making it. However, my favorite part of baking is getting to decorate the food. For my first blog I wanted to start of easy and bake simple vanilla cupcakes and on them I used vanilla frosting, gel icing, sprinkles and paper decorations. I let my siblings decorate most of them since they're younger and it's more fun for them.

Now, you may think that icing a cupcake is easy, but it isn't! In order to get the frosting to look pretty, you have to use lots of techniques. The book Hello Cupcakes by Karen Tack and Alan Richardson has lots of tips for spreading frosting, it says, "Creating  a perfectly smooth or nicely swirled top is a cinch. Your aim is to spread the frosting up to but not over the edge of the paper liner and to glue down the crumbs in the process. Hold the cupcake by its paper base in one hand and grasp the spatula in the other. Spread the frosting with a clockwise motion, while turning the cupcake counterclockwise." (Tack, Richardson, 10) This helped me a lot because I would usually just use a spoon and spread the frosting but because of the book i realized what i was supposed to do and my frosting abilities improved.

They tasted delicious! This time the cupcakes were fun and silly but don’t worry, next time the cupcakes are going to be more serious and creative. :) 

Have you ever baked cupcakes before? And how did they turn out?

Richardson, Alan, and Karen Tack. Hello, Cupcake! Houghton Mifflin, 2009.