Psych Pineapple Cupcakes!

My favorite TV show, Psych, had its series finale last night on USA.  Jim & I watched (well, I re-watched) the entire series in the last 3-4 months and happened to catch the last episode we needed to be caught up literally JUST IN TIME for the finale.  In fact, I think we missed a couple seconds of the beginning of the finale!!  It was that close.

As any true Psych-o would be, I was super into celebrating the last episode.  I painted my nails like pineapples (the show's running gag for those of you who aren't "psych-o"), made pineapple earrings (available in my etsy shop, Have A Nice Clay and pictured below), wore my lime-green sweater (the "Psych" logo color),  taught myself Gus's "Jamaican Inspector-Man" song on ukulele (from Psych: The Musical), and made pineapple (hummingbird) cupcakes.

Now let's get down to cupcake business!

The first part of the batter made a pretty pattern as I spatula'd it down.  This is just the basic flour, sugar, baking soda mix.  At some point there was also cinnamon, eggs, vanilla… But let's not get particular.

Hummingbird cupcake batter (at least in the Martha Stewart recipe) calls for crushed pineapple (the reason I chose it for Psych), shredded coconut, chopped walnuts and mashed banana (check out all those fun adjectives!  crushed, shredded, chopped and mashed! watch out, onlookers!).  Now, I have a few loved ones who do not like coconut (but I love them anyway)--my boyfriend Jim, and my dad.  Since I was making these as a surprise for Jim (and a treat for me), I realized maybe he wouldn't love a surprise involving coconut.  So as you can see in the above photo, I split the base batter in 2.  In one half I mixed all the fruity nut things, and in the other I left out the coconut. 

Crushed pineapple: 79 cents at Stop & Shop!

Coconut, pineapple, walnut, banana goodness.  Now, I'd made cupcakes for my friend Kelly's baby shower years ago, and I still had these cupcake liners left over:

They are very specific, so I can't use them for work functions or parties unless I want people to think I'm stealthily notifying them of a personal situation.  I used them for these cupcakes mostly because they are the only liners I have that have any green to them (the side, which I realize I didn't get a photo of, has a green stripe in the middle, along with white and pink).  Then I realized they DO have something to do with Psych--a couple episodes before the finale, Lassiter has a baby girl!  Hooray!  Here they are, ready to go!

If you're making hummingbird cupcakes, watch out--the batter is really tasty!  

As an aside right here, I just wanted to show off my footwear for baking.  I sprained my ankle last week & have to wear this "boot" for 2 weeks.  Wearing a heel on my other foot made it much easier to get around.  And here is my adorable apron that Jim got me :)

Anyway the kitchen smelled amazing.  I labeled which plate had coconut cupcakes on it and which had no coconut.  Then I went to bed.  The next day I put cream cheese frosting on all of them:

Then I broke out the icing gun Jim got me for my birthday!

Or should I call it a "decorating tool?"  Anyway the box is super colorful and has examples of all the kinds of decorations you can do with the assorted tips it comes with (there's even one for FILLING a cupcake with icing! Mmmm):

It was wonderful to use!  Simple to fill (I just spatula'd in all the icing and screwed the tip back on), precise handling, you control the speed, and it's easy to clean for a quick color-change too!  I used green to make the pineapple stems first, with the thinnest tip so it came out in thin lines.

Then I made dots of yellow with a thicker star tip for the spiky exterior of our friend the pineapple.

I'm super happy with how they came out!!  This icing tool is awesome!!  And my design actually looks like a pineapple!  :)

I experimented with different stems:

I only really needed a couple cupcakes.  The recipe called for 40.  FORTY!  I halved the ingredients to make 20 (it actually yielded 18) and then packed 4 in one of these adorable cupcake boxes I got from AC Moore:

Perfect for our Psych viewing party for 2!  Coconut on the left, no coconut on the right, and pineapple in ALL!  I thought the finale was PERFECT.  Plus, during the after party show, they featured a clip of ME playing ukulele to their theme song (it was a collection of clips of fans singing the theme song, and they used mine for the end of the song)!  It was an exhilarating moment!!  You can see my rendition here!  

Twilight Red Velvet Cupcakes!

It was my co-worker's daughter's 10th birthday celebration yesterday and I know she and her sister love red velvet cupcakes. I was also feeling inspired by Magnolia's Rockette cupcakes, so I decided to make some... from scratch! I used Martha Stewart's Cupcakes book.

I was curious about what was actually in red velvet to make it so red! Turns out it's mostly just red food coloring:
Yuck.. looks like blood. Good thing these are Twilight-themed! This is the sugar, oil, eggs, food coloring and vanilla. The other bowl has the cocoa powder, cake flour and salt.

Then you're supposed to combine the 2 while intermittently adding buttermilk. I didn't add the buttermilk.
Ew. So far, so gross! It looks like bacon in some sludgy form. So, be sure to remember the buttermilk.
There. I added the buttermilk. Now it looks more brown than red, though! So I dashed in a lot more food coloring.

In Martha's book it says it's called red velvet mostly because of the reaction the vinegar has with the cocoa powder. Yes, there is vinegar in red velvet cake. Who comes up with this stuff? I felt like I was making a science fair volcano because I had to mix the vinegar and baking soda in a small bowl before adding it to the mixture. Fizzzzzzz.................


It wasn't much of a volcanic reaction, otherwise I'd've taken a picture or videotaped it and shared. It was actually kind of a let-down. Maybe I should make a volcano anyway, since I have red food coloring and all that.

I have this method of putting the batter in the cupcake tins. I get a big spoon-ful of the mix and pour it in each cup, letting it fly all over the rest of the tin, because this is not a clean way of going about it. It looks like a Jackson Pollock painting. I call it "Batter Splatter":
It also looks violent.. This red food coloring is pretty creepy, actually. They came out of the oven beautifully, though!

I even make 5 mini ones with the leftover batter. How cute! They look like macarons.

Then it was time to make the cream cheese icing. Okay, Martha, whaddaya got?

FOUR cups of sifted confectioners' sugar. This is no easy task when your sifter is on its very last legs. Our sifter's spring is just about to pop out, so to use it you have to pull it back, then stop and push it back in. Each time. This was a labor of love. Four cups of love, to be exact.


Two sticks of unsalted butter, and 12 ounces of cream cheese, room temperature. It's good to read ahead; I did not. Straight from the fridge, butter and cream cheese are preeeeetty difficult to mix together. After waiting for what seemed like long enough and it still wouldn't work, I filled a zip-loc bag full of warm water and let it sit on top of the ingredients in the bowl. After a few minutes it was ready! So that is my tip for you, if you end up not reading ahead, like me.

Then add the sugar...
Mmmmmmmmmm!

Yeaaaahhh!! I barely had time to ice all 24 before I ran off to class, and I was a few minutes late! I tried to ice them like Magnolia's... The one on the left looks kind of close! :)

After class I made the decorations. I printed out a bunch of pictures of the characters from Twilight and New Moon, as well as some "Team Jacob" and "Team Edward"...
I bought this big paper-punch that makes the shape of scalloped circles--they're just so pretty, right? I was excited. I'd seen these kinds of things being sold on etsy, but I figured I could make them, too.

The girls just LOVED it, calling, "I'm Team Jacob!!" and "I want Team Edward!!" The little boy there even said, "Team Apple!" because of the Twilight book cover art. Awww. So I got to find out how red velvet is made, AND I made some 10 year olds happy! :)