Chocolate Cherry Cupcakes

This month we made delicious chocolate cupcakes with the most divine frosting we have ever made.  The frosting was really thick, like fudge, but still had a creamy texture.  It also wasn’t sugary sweet like a lot of store bought frosting is.  Here is the recipe:

1 cup softened butter

4 ½ cups confectioners’ sugar

1 ¼ cups baking (unsweetened) cocoa

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

½ cup milk

To make the cupcakes more interesting, we filled them with store bought cherry pie filling.  For a decorative touch we also topped them with a cherry from the filling.

Banana Chocolate Cupcakes

For our June cupcakes we made miniature chocolate cupcakes topped with a banana frosting.  We decided to go simple with the decorations and just add chocolate sprinkles.  Here is the recipe for the frosting:

Stir ½ a cup of butter with one medium sized banana and blend until it’s a smooth consistency.  Then, add 3 cups of powdered sugar, one cup at a time and ½ a teaspoon of vanilla.  Mix until smooth.

The frosting was delicious and was perfect with the chocolate cupcakes, but we would have liked it to be a bit thicker.  We suggest adding more powdered sugar or refrigerating it before piping it on. 

It was the first time we had made mini cupcakes and they were so cute!  They are the perfect little snack.

Tennis Cupcakes

Morgan’s tennis team had Leagues last week so they requested that we make them some tennis themed cupcakes. We started off by dying the batter blue but after it came out of the oven it looked a little green L.  We frosted them with blue for our school’s colors and added a tennis ball made out of fondant on the top.  To make the tennis balls we used store-bought fondant and died it yellowish green.  The team came out on top and won for the second year in a row.  Later, Morgan was also named the four-time Regional Champion in girl’s tennis, a school record!  Congrats, Morgan!

Springtime

We made these spring cupcakes based on some that we saw in Hello, Cupcake.  It’s actually much simpler than it looks.  All you have to do is cut mini marshmallows in half with scissors.  Then you dip the sticky side of them in colored sugar.  Next, you take a frosted cupcake and arrange the marshmallow halves like petals starting from the outside and going in.  We put a red hot in the center, but feel free to branch out and get creative.

Colorful Cupcakes

This week was our friend Ashley’s birthday, so we made cupcakes and brought them for her and our Advanced Art class.  Ashley is very creative; she was even voted Most Artistic by our senior class mock elections.  Her paintings are always really colorful, so we wanted to mimic that style in our cupcakes.  We filled them with chocolate frosting as an added surprise. 

Happy Easter!

Our April cupcakes were inspired by the Easter cupcakes in the book Hello, Cupcake.  The eggs are made from graham crackers we carved using our mad skills.  If you are wondering what the other design is, we are too…just kidding.  They are supposed to look like bunny butts.  The feet are also made from graham crackers and the tail is a mini marshmallow.

Saint Patrick’s Day Cupcakes

These are the cupcakes we made in March.  We used our handy dandy cupcake corer to hollow them out and fill them with peanut butter frosting.  Not to toot our own horns, but…YUMMM!  Cupcake corers are a great, easy way to make your cupcakes special.  Once you core them, you can use a piping bag or a Ziploc bag to squeeze a filling into the middle.  Be creative with your filling…you can use frosting, mousse, candy, pickles or whatever floats your boat.