Halloween (and Disney) Cupcakes!!

I'm never sure what kind of cupcakes to make for Halloween, but this year I ended up with spoooky red velvet :)  I was about to buy some red velvet cake mix (because when I decorate, I usually don't do the cake from scratch) but my dad pointed out this red velvet cupcake mix!  It also came with cream cheese frosting mix AND a pastry bag.  Fortunately, I'd just bought a coupler for my #6 star tip.  I'd used the tip for my rainbow cupcakes without the coupler, and this time it was much easier!

Well, I made the cupcakes with no problem:

Then I made the frosting.  It was enough for about 8 cupcakes of the 12, and that's without filling the center like the directions say.  I had to make my own and I couldn't find my Martha Stewart cupcake book!  I used some powdered sugar, butter and vanilla.  I dyed it the same orange shade as I'd dyed the first batch of frosting.  I was pretty pleased with myself! 

I had these adorable sugar ghosts holding candy corn from Party City:

 Here they are sitting pretty:

Here they are on the haunted house cupcake tower I bought last year, with some witch-finger pretzels:

Here's some favors I made after seeing them in last year's Taste of Home Halloween special:

Little cauldrons with bows and candy :)  I picked out the candy from Fuzziwigs at the mall.  Candy corn, pumpkins, and bones!  WoooOoOo!  Oh, and orange Kit Kats!

I also had these individually wrapped eyeball candy stirrers, and I bought some orange sanding sugar at AC Moore to rim the cups (just put some lime or lemon juice around the edge of the cup and dip it in a bowl of the sugar).  This drink is a Pumpkin Cream (2 parts cream, 1 part pumpkin spice liqueur), yum!

This was my costume, the Little Mermaid :) I made the costume, and I will have a separate post in my Disney blog all about it!!  I had a lot of help on the skirt from my brother-in-law, Hiro :)

And speaking of Disney, I took some pics of great Disney Halloween cupcakes when I was there last week!  I only bought one:

Mmm a chocolate and buttercream cupcake with a mouse-ears chocolate pumpkin on top!  They also had ghosts with chocolate mouse ears:

I found a video on how the pastry chef at the Contemporary (Disney hotel) makes cupcakes with a cone tip like that, which I'm excited to try.  

There were Minnie cupcakes at most fast-food stops:

Looks delicious!  And the first open spot of New Fantasyland, Storybook Circus, has some circus-themed cupcakes:

And as one would expect at Disney World, everything is...

...made fresh with magic!!  Hope you have a magical Halloween!!

Rainbow Cupcakes!!

I read in a Betty Crocker's Best Recipes magazine about these "Tie-Dye Cupcakes" with this beautiful rainbow icing.  I read the instructions for the icing, but it sounded a little confusing, so I looked up a video that was VERY helpful and it is this one here. 

No, this isn't ice cream.  It's ice-ING!  Two can's worth.  Mmmm.  I think I'll just stop here and eat it.  End of post.

...Just kidding! So you separate two can's worth into three bowls and then dye them red, yellow and blue.

Mike said it looked like the food the lost boys eat in Hook.

So you get out your pastry bag and your #6 star tip (I had to go out and buy them) and turn the bag inside-out to start piling on the icing.

First you spoon on one color.  Then another on top.  Then another.  Not too bad!  Then you start squeezing it out on a plate or wherever until you see the first color mixing with the second.  Then put it on your cupcake!  I made funfetti cupcakes the night before.  That's an easy rainbow cupcake to make!  The Betty Crocker recipe called for tie-dyed cupcakes (different colored batter all piled onto each other) but I was much more interested in the frosting!

That was my first.  How PRETTY!  I absolutely loved doing these.

Just keep going till you run out.  I ran out after exactly 12 cupcakes.  I had more icing but the bag was getting heavy and I didn't know how much I should have started out with.  This is what the bag looked like when I'd squeezed it all out:

Oooh!  Starting to get a little brown.  But otherwise it looks like I'm working on a tie-dye shirt!

I used Disney Princess liners OF COURSE!  They were going-away cupcakes for my friend Monica who just left for college.  We have this common bond over Disney Princesses.  Of course my favorite, Ariel, wasn't even represented ON the wrappers...

 Hooray!  Well, there might not be an Ariel, but here's an aerial view! (ha ha)

 
This was my first time using a pastry bag and I LOVED it!  It was so easy and they look so cool.  I would definitely make these again!

you don't have to be Brave to eat cupcakes...

When I was a kid, there were chocolate bars of Pocahontas and The Lion King.  Now there are baby carrots and reusable green bags from Subway with Merida's face on them.  Green, healthy, BORING!  I want chocolate!!  So I took it upon myself to make Brave cupcakes.
Here I am happily mixing Merida's hair color:

I was worried about making Merida.  Her amazing hair was very hard to capture in frosting and candy.  I'm sure if I had a lot more time and a real frosting bag with interchangeable tips I could have made some squiggly, Chihuly-esque wonder in shades of red, yellow and orange.  But I was mixing colors in Dixie cups, and my most fancy piece of equipment is my offset spatula.  So I ended up with a girl in pigtails:

 

I tried using mini cupcakes in the gaps to make her hair bigger, but it just wasn't working.  The triplets were easier subjects!  The M&Ms looked just like curls, as I'd hoped.  But the pictures of them are with the bear cupcake and I'll be getting to that later.  In the meantime...

 
                                          

I made Merida's arrows out of thin pretzel sticks (the kind in individual snack boxes) and cut-up and shaped Starburst.  Red's my favorite, so it was hard to use these on cupcakes I wasn't eating (I ate the ones that broke.  And I ate one of the finished cupcakes later on :))  I cut the Starburst into little bowtie shapes (cut a triangle out of either side) and stuck the pretzels into the remaining triangles.  

I thought bullseyes were red, yellow, blue.  I watched a clip of Brave on YouTube to see how their bullseyes were.  Red, white, blue, white, black.  So that's what I did.  I got pretty frustrated cuz I wanted to use blue sanding sugar for the blue ring, but that was when I thought blue was the outer ring.  I was going to roll the sides in blue.  So I tried sticking blue on in little pinches in a circle.  It came out nice but frosting was easier.   So I made blue and put some of the sprinkles inside.

I did the old ziploc-frosting-bag trick I learned from Hello, Cupcake! a few years ago.  Fortunately I had red icing from an earlier project (Muppets).  I had chocolate frosting so I ziploc'd that too.  Ta-da:

Then I added the preztel arrows:

Arrowed!!  (that's a Teen Girl Squad reference for ya)

I was pretty proud of these!

After all this, the bears were much easier.   I frosted a chocolate cupcake and put on a few melting chocolates.  Then I put blue M&Ms on the melts with icing as glue for the eyes (it wasn't till I saw the movie that I realized the mother bear has brown eyes) and brown icing as the nose. 

And, even though this picture's darker, it had flash so it gives the little flecks of white like in normal cartoon eyes:

 

Oh how cute!  Haha.  I was actually going to make 3 of these as the 3 little bears but I ran out of chocolate melts.  I turned to the mini cupcakes I had standing by, and the chocolate morsels, and made these:

 3 actual little bears!  It was all so fun.  So here's one of the bears with the triplets:

 Yay!  So finally I frosted 2 cupcakes with vanilla and covered them in blue sprinkles and piped "be BRAVE" onto them:

So here they are all together:

Yay!  And here I am with them :)

Here's that bullseye with the sprinkles I was telling you about, on the top right corner:

I boxed some up for my friends Kim & Jeff since they were my double date to the movie.  I just adore these fold-up boxes I got from AC Moore.  I felt so professional!

The movie was great!  It's a real mother-daughter movie, which I wasn't aware of.  I would have seen it with my mom, otherwise!  But it was fun, and I suggest you stay till after the credits ;)

blog love

There were 3 main reasons why I began to blog.  1. I love cupcakes & feel great when I share what I made.  2. I read Julie & Julia and was inspired.  3. A friend of mine recommended bakerella.com to me and I fell in love. 

Well, upon returning from my latest Disney trip (Feb 26-March 2), I began a Disney blog called Oh Boy, Mickey!  I've been posting photos, tips and observations and I'm just having so much fun with it!  I'm expecting a double-blog post in the not-too-distant future featuring Disney-inspired cupcakes...

Well I decided to catch up on my favorite blog today and found out that Bakerella went to Disney World for a food blogger expo!  What are the odds?!  I got so excited and just wanted to share it with you.  You should definitely check her site out and do so regularly.  Here's the post that combined two of my favorite things: Bakerella and Disney!

St. Patty's Cupcakes

About a month ago I found these great edible cupcake toppers at Party City:


I knew what I needed to do. I gathered the troops:


Buttercream icing, Duncan Hines "frosting creations" flavor mix, and, of course, the cupcakes. I made Devil's Food in orange foil wrappers.

What I was most excited about (besides the tiny beer mugs, of course) was the flavor mix! I'd never seen this before--it was only because I needed to buy cake mix that I even went to the baking aisle of A&P (usually I go to Shop Rite, or Orange Farm Market, but this was last-minute and my brothers happened to be going to a plaza that had an A&P in it). Well I was thinking of making mint or at least dyed-green icing, but this was BOTH.

Perfect! All you do is buy a can of icing, stick a knife in the center and try to create a hole (I say "try" because it was impossible for me to make a hole. It was more like a small depression). You pour the entire packet in (it's a small packet but it still seems like a lot) and stir, stir, stir.

Mmm.

I iced all the cupcakes and put the little beers on top, and they were all ready to go for work :) They tasted pretty good, too!

Hope you had a happy St. Patrick's Day!

muppet. cupcakes.

I have been waiting to make these forever. I've been a Muppet fan for just as long. David & I used to watch Muppet Babies as kids on Saturday mornings. Our parents took us to see Muppet Babies Live at The Meadowlands. I remember watching Muppet Frog Prince on TV & some episodes of the Muppet Show. We also especially loved Muppet Family Christmas, the holiday movie when all the Muppets (ever--Fraggles & Sesame Street included) come to Fozzie's mom's (Emily Bear's) house (Thank you, Caitlin, for the link!). David & I have a special place in our hearts for Muppet Treasure Island, an often-overlooked Muppet Treasure (eh??? fun-nee!). I remember going crazy over Weezer's video with the Muppets (pretty much my 2 favorite things at the time) for Keep Fishin', and for the great connection my college roommate, Caitlin, and I had (have) over our mutual love for Muppets. We watched the Mahna Mahna and Mr. Bassman videos probably once daily our first month living together. I also had an intro song to my radio show that she and my other college friends helped me record for "Elyse's Muppet Radio Show."

...So it only makes sense that I'd want to make Muppet cupcakes!! I don't know what took me so long! But it probably had something to do with the Muppet Movie coming out, and then Bakerella doing Muppet Cake Pops. Anyway, it's time to get things started!!

First things first, here I am mixing the cake batter:


My parents got me these awesome mixing sticks for Christmas. They look like drumsticks on one end and one has a music note cut out of the spoon:


So there's a cookin' end and a rockin' end:

Haha. I love it!

Then I switched to the hand-held mixer. Once the cupcakes were done, I mixed up a dixie cup of vanilla frosting & green food coloring. I piped black icing onto white melting chocolates, and cut out collars from green sugar paper (my first time using it!).

Hi-ho, Kermit! Except he has a swirl on his face, and no mouth. So I cut out some red sugar paper:


He kind of looks like anime-Kermit here. I made mini versions of all of them, too. For mini-Kermit I used coconut M&Ms (for the white ones--I could have just bought white regular m&ms at Fuzziwigs, but I'd already been there twice in preparation for my magnum opus, so I got these from CVS which is closer to my house) and edible-ink markers for the pupils!


(I had left my camera at Mike's from taking pictures of the dinner we cooked the night before--spinach & turkey bacon macaroni & cheese, thanks for asking--and the sugar paper collar had wilted overnight! Now I know that about sugar paper!)

Then I tried Fozzie. I got so excited when I was at Target the other day browsing through the 50%-off Christmas selection & I saw Reese's Bells on sale! I didn't even remember that these were out, and the fact that they were half-off was like a post-Christmas present from Target to me. Thank you, Target. They made perfect Fozzie hats!!


His ears are orange melting chocolates with black icing piped on, and his nose, eyelids and mouth are sugar paper.


It makes me so happy when they come out just how I wanted!! Hey friends!

Oh, hey, little Fozzie! I had these Wilton candy eyes (they used to make smaller ones but I could find them NOWHERE) that looked like they'd been on the shelf for a while and the pupils were sort of green and dusty-looking. Fortunately my edible-ink marker did the trick! I also used one of those sugar dots from the receipt-tape-looking sheet of different colored dots... You know what I'm talking about? That old-fashioned penny candy stuff. That was a perfect nose. I used the bag of 2 sheets absolutely once. Actually twice, I made 2 mini Fozzies. I have so much candy left over. Anyone want to come over?

The hat, another perfect Reese's creation, is an Unwrapped Mini Reese's. I had to buy a whole zip-top bag. I know, I didn't want to buy SO MANY but... I actually really did... And I actually really love them. I mean, those mini Reeses with the wrapper just slowed me down! I have to thank Bakerella for the hat idea though, she used them on her Fozzie cake pops and they just look perfect and adorable! I'm so glad they worked here, too!

The next day (yes, it took me a few days... decorating is exhausting!) I made Rowlf. I realize his face should be a little lighter and his ears darker, but what are ya gonna do? I used what I had. I love how the chocolate chips in the frosting makes him look furry! I bought Jordan Almonds way back because I thought they'd make perfect Rowlf eyes (a little Rowlf history: his eyes are spoons, or at least they're exactly spoon-shaped, and he was the mascot for some dog food ads in the 60's, and was even a co-star on the Jimmy Dean show, a variety show from the same time). His nose is a dark chocolate malt ball, and his ears are flattened Tootsie Rolls.

Mini-Rowlf has jelly bean eyes (David's idea!!), a coconut M&M nose, and cut-out Tootsie Roll ears (I got fancy and used a tiny cookie cutter).

I also found out flattened Tootsie Rolls melt when enclosed overnight. Turns out they have a lot in common with sugar paper. And his eye is a little lazy, but we'll forgive him.

Then it was diva time. Miss Piggy actually required a LOT of work. And I'm sure she wouldn't have it any other way. I made a light pink/orange color for her piggie complexion, then halved a marshmallow for her nose (it was a last-minute inspiration when I remembered that I had a bag of marshmallows in my room. I asked my dad to buy them for me a while back when I wanted to get in the Christmas spirit, and big marshmallows in my hot chocolate is a fond Christmassy memory).



Then I took some white coconut M&Ms and drew black pupils with blue irises on them with edible-ink marker, then half-dipped them in purple melting chocolates for her eyelids.


Complicated stuff! This might be rocket science!


I tried to draw on little eyelashes with black marker but melting chocolate isn't a big fan of markers. Then, and this gets me the most excited (about Piggy, anyway), I put peach (I think) gummies on her head for ears. They look the most Muppet-like out of everything! The texture, I mean. I had to prop them up with marshmallows. Good thing I had them!


Piggy has so many hairstyles, I didn't know which one to use. Of course I just went with the easiest. I mean, classiest:


O and of course I added pearls! Sprinkles, actually, "pearlized" sprinkles.


Aw! I used an ear as little Piggy's nose, and the eyes are the Wilton candy eyes (given the same treatment). I used some pink fondant I wanted to try as her ears, and it smelled weird and plastic-y, but it was easy to mold and looked pretty cool.




Kermieeeeee!

Gonzo looks so funny in steps. I first put blue icing on, then rolled the edges in blue sanding sugar. I used white melting chocolates for his eyes, and (also a last-minute inspiration) banana Runts as eyelids!


Sugar paper mouth.. and the nose...

A blue Jolly Rancher! Mike gave me that idea. I thought maybe I could find a blue Tootsie Roll, but alas the wrapper is blue and the Tootsie is white. He still didn't look just right without those head feathers! So, another last-minute idea, I used 2 blue jellybeans!


O yay! He just looks so Gonzo-y!

I'm not as crazy about mini-Gonzo. He looks, well, we'll just say "dazed," and his jelly bean nose just isn't doing it for me. I stuck a fish candy in his head as the feathers, which makes me laugh.


Finally, on the third day, though I wanted to make the Mahna Mahna "Snowths" (the pink guys), chickens, Sweetums, and well I guess every Muppet ever, I settled on ONE non-always-in-the-spotlight Muppet. Lew Zealand. He wears a collar, like an old-fashioned white clown collar, and throws fish.

There's my pieces for him. Then I realized he kind of just looks like Ernie with a moustache. I used coconut M&Ms and a red gumball. Of course I put an extra cupcake holder around him to look like the collar (I was pretty excited about that part).


And, also of course, I put little candy fish around him, since he's just not Lew Zealand without his fish.

I put them on a mini cupcake just for fun:


Mike got me a new camera for Christmas, by the way, so all my pictures are nice and crisp & clear! This fish one (above) especially came out nice.

Then, as per Mike's suggestion so I wasn't driving myself crazy trying to make more Muppets or letting some bald cupcakes go to waste, I iced the leftovers and wrote "The Muppets" on them.



And here they all are! Together!

I brought them to work (so we wouldn't devour them here at home) and my coworkers just LOVED them. It made me feel so great. They all came to the break room to admire them, loudly and excitedly, and I ate it all up. (Actually, I didn't eat any. I made myself a mini Fozzie when I got home and ate that! It was pretty delicious with the Reese's cup and the M&Ms! I took the eyes off though!).

Also, I can't believe I frog-ot (haha) to mention how much I love Jim Henson. He is absolutely one of my favorite people--he seemed like such a loving, creative, youthful individual who made the world so fun and beautiful. Thank you, Jim Henson. :)