Educational Cake

While in line to see Iron Man, my friend Shawn said, "I'd want an Indiana Jones birthday cake". I was pretty sure he wasn't hinting, but that didn't stop me from making it anyway. The cake making was complicated by two things:

1. Shawn is a very picky eater.
2. I didn't remember anything about Indiana Jones.

But I tried my best and it turned out semi-decent. More importantly, I learned a lot.

Many thanks to our friend Adrienne who was kind enough to take the pictures below.



When I think of Indiana Jones, the first thing I think of is brown. The second thing is that scene where the guy rips the other guy's heart out and it beats in his hand. I don't have the skills to make a beating heart cake topper (but hope to add it to my repertoire by Valentine's Day!), so I decided to make the cake brown using the Chocolate Buttercream Frosting from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World. The cake itself was a double recipe of the Crimson Velveteen Cupcakes from the same book. I topped the cake with a "whip" made of marzipan and wrote Happy Birthday Shawn in the closest I could get to the Indiana Jones font.

I used the Crimson Velveteen Cupcake recipe, not a regular cake recipe, because I already knew the birthday boy liked it. Oddly, I was short a tabelspoon of food coloring, but was still able to taste it in the cake. I've made this recipe as cupcakes many times and never experienced that before. It was really weird. Because it wasn't a cake recipe, the cakes turned out a little larger than they should have and the tops rounded. I was dumb and it didn't occur to me to trim them until the next day, so as you can see here, the cake was very lopsided and has a noticeable seam:



My first idea was to make a fedora (or heart full of cherry pie filling) out of home made chocolate clay, but after discussing it with Adrienne, I decided to stick with marzipan because I already knew Shawn liked it and a whip because it should be relatively easy. I used Wilton's coloring paste on it and it ended up the exact same color as the frosting. That wasn't good, so I added some black. Then it was 3 AM and I decided the color was good enough, so I worked on the shape, modeled after this picture.

For the writing, I printed out the Happy Birthday and tried to trace it onto cardboard using a Xacto knife. Unfortunately, I don't have any hand-eye coordination, so Adrienne had to trace out the stencil for me instead. I thought that if I frosted the whole cake, then put the stencil on top of it, I'd ruin the frosting, so I left a blank area for the stencil, which I filled in using a pastry bag and some light yellow royal icing. I then went over it with some orange food coloring on my finger, then red over that. I intended on using a small knife to frost between the letters, but once I was done, I knew that'd never work and ended up with a naked stripe across the cake. Next time, I'll definitely frost the whole thing, do the stencil, then just smooth the defects in the frosting as best as I can.

As you can see, it totally needed more filling:



The final thing I learned making this cake: brown marzipan looks like a turd. D'oh!

Thankfully, that was my last cake for June. As far as I know, July will be a month of rest. Then I hope to bake for two or three people in August, depending on who lets me honor their birthday in pastry fashion.

Happy Mothers Day!

Happy belated Mother's Day to all the mothers reading this. And all the wannabe mothers. And all the people who have mothers. And everyone who likes mothers. Basically, I hope everyone had a nice Sunday.

My mother's birthday was also this weekend. As I mentioned in my birthday post, she loved my birthday cake (a little too much), so I made Blackout the Forest Cupcakes for her and my grandmother for Mother's Day/her birthday.

(Note: the post behind the cut is pretty image heavy; I was finally able to take some photos in daylight and may have gotten a little carried away.)



I started out with the same recipes I used for the cake, Raspberry Blackout Cake with Ganache-y Frosting and Chocolate Chip-Raspberry Blondie Bars from Vegan With a Vengeance, halving them and substituting cherries for raspberries. This yielded ten cupcakes. One could probably get eleven out of it, but I tend to overfill.

The cross-hatching on some of the cupcakes is neither functional nor decorative. I just dropped them upside down on the cooling rack.



Next, I cut a cone out of the center of each cupcake, trying to keep the removed part as tidy as possible, so it could be replaced neatly:



Then I filled the hole partway with the cherry layer:



Topped that with ganache:



Topped that with the bits of the cupcakes I'd cut out earlier (trimmed down for a neater fit - and so I had something to snack on):



Then the cupcakes went in the fridge until the ganache hardened and I could be pretty certain nothing would fall off when I turned the cupcakes upside down. Once they were cooled, I covered them with cherry preserves. I covered the full size cake with more of the cherry layer I made, but I didn't think the cupcakes would be able to accommodate the lumpiness of the cherries and still look nice:



I dipped each cupcake in the still warm ganache:



Then the cupcakes went back in the fridge, joined by the ganache, so it could harden. When it was firm, I used the icing to pipe ganache-y os on the cupcakes:



That was topped with chocolate covered cherries, and when I ran out of cherries, a truffle made from leftover ganache:



The money shot:




Loads of extra pictures:

Happy Birthday to Me!

Yesterday was my birthday, and in honor of that most auspicious of occasions, I baked a cake and brought it to work for my office birthday party on Thursday. I call it Blackout the Forest Cake because it's sort of like a cross between blackout cake and black forest cake. To make it, I adapted parts of Raspberry Blackout Cake with Ganache-y Frosting and Chocolate Chip-Raspberry Blondie Bars from Vegan With a Vengeance.



I started out making the Raspberry Blackout Cake, substituting cherry preserves for raspberry:



Instead of topping it with more cherry preserves, I made the raspberry layer from the Chocolate Chip-Raspberry Blondie Bars, substituting frozen cherries for raspberries:



All that was topped with ganache:



Then another cake and more cherries. When I moved the second cake from the cooling rack to the cake, it ripped about halfway down and I nearly shit my pants. Thankfully, all the toppings covered it up quite nicely and no one could tell:



Then, the whole thing was frosted with ganache and refrigerated along with the remaining topping to firm it up to a spreadable and pipeable consistency:



I also dipped some fresh cherries in the ganache for decoration. I kept the stems on because I thought they kind of looked like birthday candles, and because it made them easier to dip. To get a good layer of chocolate on them, I dipped them, refrigerated them, dipped them again and put them back in the fridge until it was time to use them:



I'm not so great at frosting cakes yet, so I wasn't able to completely hide the seam between the cakes when I poured on the ganache. I managed to cover the seam with the refrigerated ganache, but it didn't come out as smooth as I'd hoped. I guess I just need practice (the top isn't so smooth either, but that's to be expected with the cherry chunks on it).

The next thing I did was pipe chocolate circles onto the cake wherever I wanted to place the fresh cherries. I think of them as "Ganache-y Os":



Then I pressed the chocolate covered cherries into the ganache-y os:



I probably should have done the cake assembly and decoration on the base of my cake carrier, but I didn't because I'm not so smart. I also made the even less smart move of covering my carrier with parchment paper, so that when I piped around the base of the cake, I wouldn't be doing it directly onto the carrier. Moving the cake from the cutting board to the carrier was a nightmare. I really thought I was going to wreck the whole thing. The sides ripped significantly, but I was able to hide it with icing. Then I piped a border on the top and bottom of the cake:



Thanks to the stupid parchment, the cake slid around the carrier throughout my commute (bus, train and 20-minute walk) and I thought it would certainly be ruined by the time I got to work. As you can see from the picture at the top of the post, it didn't turn out too bad; the trim is just a little flat. Here's a shot of the inside:



The cake went over very well, with two people having seconds and one attempting to steal one of the pieces saved for absentees.

Since I'd never made a cake like this before, I did half a test cake last weekend by baking one cake, cutting it in half and layering the two halves instead of layering two cakes:



Here's a shot of the cherry and chocolate layers:



My family loved the testcake so much I knew it'd be good enough for my coworkers. Actually, my mother loved it a little too much: my father had to make her back away from the table and when no one was looking, she rushed the cake and took a second piece (part of a piece I was saving for a friend). She's been talking about the cake all week, so I'm in the process of turning it into cupcakes for Mother's Day (literally in the process; I'm typing this while the ganache is cooling in the fridge). If the cupcakes turn out half as well as the cake did, it will be a happy Mother's Day indeed.

Lucky, Lucky, Youre So Lucky

OK, I don't actually know if you're lucky or not (though I hope you are!), but some would consider my friend Lauren lucky because I baked Franz Ferdinand (the band, not the archduke) themed Fauxstess cupcakes, from Vegan With a Vengeance, for her birthday.




This was my second time making the Fauxstess cupcakes and I encountered the same problem I did the first time: I can't get the damn royal icing for the squigglies right.

For some reason, the "red" came out great, but the green just wouldn't loosen up. Even though I skipped the soy milk powder this time. I kept adding water and it just went right on being thick. I ended up giving up, picking the icing out of the pastry bag with my fingers, rolling it like clay and pressing it onto the cupcake tops.

Also, the icing that's not green was made using the food coloring called "Red Red". I don't know who those Wilton people think they're fooling, because that's pink pink.

I finally got to taste one of them this time. SO CHOCOLATEY. Needs more filling, though. Next time, I'm going to try making the hole with my thumb instead of my pinky, so there's more room.

There will certainly be a next time.



The restaurant was nice enough to provide a candle:



Mmmm...creamy filling.

Happy Holidays! Kinda.

Like all normal people, my friends and I had our gift-giving-holiday get together on Sunday, January 13. This year, all of my gifts were homemade (baked or knit - I forgot to photograph the knit. I suck). But you can still behold the baked goods in all their questionable glory:



First, I made two dozen Crimson Velveteen Cupcakes from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World and one dozen Fauxstess Cupcakes from Vegan With a Vengeance:



Then the fun began.

Fauxstess cupcakes are so fun to make. Once they're cool, you poke a hole in them with your finger and pipe it full of fluffy frosting. If you're me, you fill some of them with pink fluffy frosting.



Then you dip them in warm ganache, which I believe is French for chocolategasm.



Then it's time to turn the cupcakes into records. Using a small, circular thing I found at NY Cake Supplies which may or may not be a cookie cutter, I cut a hole in the ganache and scraped it off. In two cases, I cut a little too deeply and removed some cupcake too. It was tasty. I replaced the disc of ganache with a disc of colored marzipan: the label.



Then I used royal icing to write the band names on the labels and to do the regular Fauxstess squigglies. My royal icing was WAY to thick and I had a lot of difficulty getting it to pipe. All my lettering was completely illegible. So I added water when I added the pink food coloring, scraped off the old letters and rewrote the names. The icing was too runny, and the letters were all over the place. But I was at the end of my tether, so I decided to leave them alone and translate if necessary (for the curious, they say !!!, Interpol, The Beatles, CYHSY [Clap Your Hands Say Yeah], Ben Folds and Ambulance [LTD]). I also used dabs of ganache to make the spindles.



The first half dozen Crimson Velveteen cupcakes were for my friend who loves red velvet (and sweets in general), so I topped them with a brightly colored swirl of Old Fashioned Velveteen Icing from VCTOTW and silver dragees.





The next set of Velveteens were for someone who loves Star Wars, so I dyed the icing and some marzipan green and made Yoda cupcakes. They came out way better than I expected them to and made me very happy.





The next set were for one of the people who taught me to knit, so I stole VeganYumYum's knit cupcakes idea. Unfortunately, her site was down when I was working on these and I'd only printed out the pictures, so I didn't know how to keep the marzipan from cracking. Fail. These and the vinyl took the most time. The vinyl because I think I spent two hours just fucking around with the royal icing and these because I had trouble getting the marzipan to stick to itself and stand the way I wanted it to (I ended up making little marzipan "pillows" to hold up the fabricy looking pieces).

To get all of these done before our party, I actually ended up baking and cooking through the night. While I was working on one of these knit cupcakes, I realized it was after 10 AM, I hadn't been to bed and I still had gingerbread to decorate. Guess which cupcake I was working on when the realization hit:



A work-in-progress in an ugly colorway:



A ball of yarn:



A fringed scarf:



Yarngut:



Ball of yarn with needles:



Lastly, I made gingerbread hipsters with the recipe from The PPK. When I made a test batch of gingerbread, I used an eight inch cookie cutter which made gingerbread men the size of small children. Seriously. The heads were bigger than my fist. Awesome as that was, I wanted something slightly smaller for this, so I got a five inch cookie cutter. It worked much better.

I had hoped to decorate these in loads of different colors and get all fancy and detailed, but I was tired, my icing was runny and my brain wasn't working, so I ran out of cliches after about two. Damn. I suck.



Left to right:
Top row: asymmetrical hair and a stud belt, fauxhawk and eyeliner abuse, asymmetrical hair and bling, a MisShape.
Middle row: obscure band t-shirt, sideburns and what may be pinstripe pants, asymmetrical hair and stud belt, I don't know what the last one started out as, but now I think it's a bald Carlos D.
Bottom row: my Chucks failed so they became Uggs. I think the last speaks for itself.

Despite how sloppy and unprofessional the cupcakes and cookies looked, everyone seemed to like them, and that's what counts. I received many a food-related gift this holiday season and look forward to using them to make food for others (especially if I'm baking. Everyone but me should eat the baking!).

Birthday Baking

Last Sunday, we threw a bit of a birthday celebration for one of my friends and I was entrusted with the cake detail. This was a real challenge because the birthday girl is allergic to most nuts, most fruits (except citrus fruits), soy, whole grains, beer and wine. And she loves pumpkin. I thought the Chocolate Chip Pumpkin Cupcakes with Cinnamon Icing from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World would be good, but I didn't really want to bring cupcakes to a party again. Causing friends to be bored of cupcakes is a cardinal sin. So I brought my task to The PPK and with some suggestions from them and some idea stealing from other Internets, I ended up with this:



(I can't believe I forgot to get a picture from the side!)

I stole the pumpkin cake shaped like a pumpkin idea from BitterSweetBlog. It's a great idea that would have been absolutely adorable in more skilled hands (and in a bundt pan that didn't have points). I don't think my version is too terrible, though.

All I did was make a double recipe for the Chocolate Chip Pumpkin cupcake batter substituting the soy milk for rice, dump it in the bundt pan and bake it for about an hour. Then I made another half-recipe for six cupcakes. I also made one batch of the Cinnamon Icing, colored with Moss Green paste and colored some marzipan.

I stuffed the hole in the center of the cake with two cupcakes (unwrapped), then chopped off part of a block of fancy, frou frou artisanal chocolate I bought at Whole Foods (not because I'm a chocolate snob but because it was the only chocolate I could find that was close to the right size/shape, vegan and kosher) and stuck it in the cupcakes to make the stem. I shaped the green marzipan into a leaf. The green icing was supposed to do double duty as the birthday greeting and a vine with smaller leaves, but the vine looks more like a line made by someone with seriously shaky hands.

It's unfortunate that the bundt cake came out so much darker than the cupcakes. Of course, my family didn't care since they got to eat the leftover cupcakes.

The cake went over quite well and even the birthday girl's family was able to have some leftovers. I think I can consider my first birthday cake a success.

The raw cake:



The raw cupcakes:



Cake and cupcakes. Two tastes that taste great together (especially when they're the same damn thing):



Left over cupcakes:



With candles:



Blow it out!

Holiday Cupcakes

This blog is significantly behind my bloggable life, and for that, I apologize.

Let's rewind to Saturday, December eighth, shall we?

I spent the evening baking two dozen of the Veganomicon's Jelly Donut Cupcakes for my family's Channukkah party Sunday.



These cupcakes are SO easy to make. And so unique! Also, they don't use a mixer, so you can make them at 3 AM without waking anyone. And they're so fast to make that you can bake them at 3 AM without killing a whole night's sleep. Most of my cupcakes were left with holes in the top, but most jelly donuts have holes in the side, so people actually preferred them that way. The texture and flavor were very different from the previous cupcakes I'd made (all from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World). They were a bit more dense, and definitely donuty.

When I finished making the cupcakes, I met up with some friends to go to Strawberry Fields. On my way to see them, I got the idea to add a butternut squash to my vegetable menorah, but didn't think anything would come of it because I was out. When we got together, we realized we hadn't brought anything for John, so we stopped at Whole Foods for onions. I also bought a ten-pound butternut squash. And carried it around ALL NIGHT. I think it enjoyed Barcade.

I also brought the Veganomicon Spiced Yogurt Sauce to the party as an alternative dip for the veggies (someone else brought one with a sour cream base).

Cupcakes: ready for the jelly



Jellied



Baked



The Cavern O' Jelly



Powdered



From the inside



My date for the evening: the butternut squash

Advice!

Here is some advice. Free. No charge. Gratis. Just for you:

Don't break your arm in three places while arm wrestling drunk unless you have someone willing to bake you cupcakes while you're in the hospital.

Just saying.



Those are Your Basic Chocolate Cupcakes topped with green Vegan Fluffy Buttercream Frosting from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World and Harry Potter sprinkles in Harry Potter cups. Why green and Harry Potter? Why not?

I got home from visiting the hospital a bit after 1 AM, realized I couldn't sleep and was in the mood to bake, so I did.

I was always under the impression that ice cream scoops only came in one size. That's apparently not the case. The new one we got is huge and I can fill about two cupcake cups with it. Of course, it took me a while to realize that, so I ended up with a few muffin tops.

Also, my oven seems to be kind of fucked, so when the cupcakes were supposed to be done, they were still very wet in the center and the temperature was 340 instead of 350. I turned it up and left them in for a while longer and they seem to be OK.

This was my first time working with the pasty food coloring. It was pretty neat. I didn't know how concentrated it was, so I dipped a fork in the coloring, scraped the fork against the beaters, then resumed beating the frosting. It was pretty cool because the white frosting would turn really dark green around the beaters, then the color would slowly lighten and spread. I really like the mint green I got, but it makes me wish I had some mint extract to put in the frosting, making chocolate-mint cupcakes.

Also, I need to remember to use a bigger bowl next time I make that frosting. The beaters sprayed it everywhere, even when I tried to block it with my hands. I spent quite a bit of time cleaning up when I was done.

A friend gave me the Harry Potter sprinkles when I first got into baking, but I didn't know what I'd be able to use them for now that the series was over, so this was a good use. I bought the HP cups myself, on the cheap, to match them.

I had originally planned on spelling out GET WELL SOON in frosting on the cupcakes, but I miscounted the number of letters in the phrase and made two swirly cupcakes to use as spaces. Once I did that, I just did a bunch of other swirlies and wrote GWS (I couldn't bring myself to do one more swirl at 4 AM!). I really wanted to use the big star tip for the frosting, but it was upstairs and I was lazy, so I tried the small star. I think I would have been there until 6 AM if I used the small star, so I switched to a large crescent. The tip itself was pretty cool looking, but the icing was unimpressive. At least it was fast!

Naked cupcakes in all their nerdy glory:



Close up of the cup:



Spork 2000s:

Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the Office

Halloween (like most other holidays) has never been that big of a deal for me, but right now, I look at pretty much everything as an excuse to bake. My office had a small celebration and my friends had a gathering as well, so this was a two-dozen cupcake holiday.

I made one batch of Vampire Bites and one of Mummy Cakes. I saw recipes for these posted on Curious Cupcakes this summer and knew I just HAD to have them. Then, Vegan.Chicks.Rock. posted a veganized version of the Vampire Bites last week, saving me the trouble of sorting it all out myself. Win!

So in the end, all I needed was:

A double batch of VCTOTW's Golden Vanilla Cupcakes
A batch of VCTOTW's Old Fashioned Velvet Icing
A can of cherry pie filling
Some phyllo dough, margarine and brown sugar

Sounds easy enough, right? Ha!



I was so in the mood to make something that I actually prepared the icing a day in advance and stored it in an airtight container in my fridge just to have something to do on Monday night. I just couldn't stay out of the kitchen last week. Craziness, I tell you!

Vampire Bites: These came out pretty well and were really fun to make since they're kind of an "advanced" cupcake. Once the cupcakes cooled, I cut a cone out of the center of each, spooned in some cherry pie filling and put the top, flat part of the cone back on, so I had a bunch of closed, cherry-filled cupcakes. Of course, I didn't pay attention to which cones came out of which cupcakes, so none of them fit back on properly, but I think the discrepancy only caused a real problem a couple of times (problem = cherry mixing in with the icing, making the whole cake look like a bloody mess). Icing them was kind of tricky because of the wobbly tops, but I quickly discovered a messy yet practical solution: fingers. I think I've seen other recipes that call for cutting, filling, re-topping and icing cupcakes, so here are my personal steps for icing wobble-top cakes:

1. Spoon the icing onto the cupcake in your usual way.
2. Hold the cupcake in your non-writing hand, with one finger holding down the wobble top.
3. Spread the icing using a finger or two on your writing hand, turning the cake as necessary until your icing is relatively smooth.
4. Repeat as necessary for all cakes.
5. Lick your fingers clean.

DO NOT SWITCH THE ORDER OF STEPS FOUR AND FIVE!

Also, please do everyone a favor and wash after you lick.

After that, wiggling a toothpick around in the icing made the holes and I wiped a bit of cherry pie filling below each hole to look like the dripping puncture wounds left by a vampire on the prowl. Yum!

I cannot tell you how much cherry pie filling and icing I ate without the cake while preparing them. It's gross. After that, I thought the cupcakes would be too sweet for me to stomach, so I let all my coworkers and friends eat them first. Once they assured me they weren't disgustingly sweet, I ate the last one and loved it. It's a shame I'm the sort of person who won't make the same dish for the same holiday ever again if I'm celebrating it with the same people. I mean really. Who wants to be known as Vegan Vampire Cupcake Girl?

Mummy Cakes: These were far easier and plainer than the Vampire Bites. Once the Golden Vanilla Cupcakes were done baking, all I was supposed to do was cut some phyllo dough into strips, soak it in a marinade of 1/4 cup melted margarine and brown sugar, "wrap the strips around the top of the cupcakes, starting from the center and moving out to the sides and put them back into the oven for 5 to 10 minutes, until the filo strips are crisp and golden." No one but me could possibly fuck that up.

Apparently someone in my house (I'm not naming names) doesn't know the difference between puff pastry and phyllo dough. I was told there was phyllo dough in the freezer, found some dough with "P..." on the packaging, assumed it was phyllo and started cutting it up and soaking it. It wasn't until I was actually wrapping it around the cupcakes that I realized just how thick it was and looked at the package. Puff pastry. Great. And, of course, we didn't actually have any phyllo dough, so I just followed the instructions using the puff pastry instead.

Obviously, the cupcakes looked nothing like mummies. Some looked like roses, the rest looked like shit. The edges puffed up nicely, but I was afraid to keep the cupcakes in the oven too long, so the centers and other areas where the dough was really thick ended up nearly raw.

Personally, I liked them, raw dough and all. Maybe I'm weird. Nobody but my mother complained about them, so I guess they couldn't be that bad, but only eight of twelve were eaten (compared to eleven of twelve of the vampires) so maybe they were that bad. The raw dough peeled off the top of the cupcakes easily and I wouldn't have been at all offended if people did that if it allowed them to enjoy the cupcake below, but no one except my mother did. Also, I think the cupcakes turned out a bit more muffiny than usual because the margarine from the topping seeped in as they were rebaked. Still tasty, but muffiny.

(And yes, I did intentionally wait until after midnight to post this so it could count as Sunday's VeganMoFo post.)

Birthdays are for Baking

I'm starting this blog with entries about what led up to me wanting to keep it. This post is backdated to approximately the date it happened.

My little brother just discovered rock 'n' roll turned sixteen. He's been drooling over VCTOTW's Cookies 'n' Cream and S'mores cupcake recipes since I bought the book, so I decided to treat him for his birthday. I went with the S'mores, which surprised me because given a choice, I always pick the more chocolaty option.



I stuck to the book's recipe, but used half all-purpose and half whole wheat flour. Then I frosted them with a spoon because I still hadn't replaced my burst pastry bag, stuck an eighth of a graham cracker on each one and used a vegetable peeler to put some semi-sweet chocolate shavings on top for that little bit of extra birthday fancy.

Everyone is so used to standard chocolate or vanilla cupcakes with the difference being in the filling or topping that my family and brother's friends were pleasantly surprised by the graham taste of the cupcakes themselves. And they all agreed my decorating skills had improved since my first try, despite the fact that I was back to working with a spoon. The best part was now that I was finally getting the hang of the baking thing (and I was only doing one batch, not six), everyone still thought it took me ages to make the cupcakes, but it didn't take much time at all.

Cupcakes: Bringing More Joy to Joyous Occasions Since (at least) 1796

I'm starting this blog with entries about what led up to me wanting to keep it. This post is backdated to approximately the date it happened.

(No, I didn't make that date up. I found it here.)

Two of my best friends recently married each other, and the masses rejoiced. The rejoicement was aided and abetted by the sixty cupcakes I baked for the wedding shower. Most of the shower guests were not vegetarians, so I baked thirty vegan cupcakes and thirty dairy.

For the vegan cupcakes, I used the Crimson Velveteen Cupcakes with Old-Fashioned Velvet Icing from VCTOTW and I made the Lemon Cheesecake recipe from The Cupcake Book because the engaged couple and their family members all love cheesecake.



The Crimson Velveteen Cupcakes were done with half all-purpose and half whole wheat flour. Again, I baked a test batch to see if I could make them, but instead of just testing them on my family this time, I also gave two to people planning the shower with me. Everyone loved them. They were tasty and pretty, despite my spoon-applied frosting (I wasn't ready for the pastry bag just yet).

The bride doesn't like lemon cakes, so I omitted the lemon juice from the Lemon Cheesecakes. When we tasted them, they were delicious (my brother said it was the best cheesecake he'd ever had), but I thought they were very greasy and one of my friends said they were a bit too dense. Also, they puffed up very high during baking, then fell while cooling, making a bit of a crater in the top of each one.

I clearly had some work to do if I wanted to wow and amaze with my baked goods.

We needed 60 cupcakes, but I ended up making 72 since I wanted equal amounts of vegan and dairy. This was great because I wasn't able to fit all 72 in the pastry boxes I got, so the messed up ones stayed home.

I made the three dozen Crimson Velveteen cupcakes the same way I'd made them the first time...except I ran out of red food coloring. One dozen ended up brown velvet, but almost all of those went to my family because of the box issue. The decorating with the pastry bag went far better than I'd expected. I was able to make simple swirls, lines and dots reasonably neatly. I didn't do any tall icing swirls because most of the people I knew would be there are not huge icing fans; they prefer the cake.

Yes, everything was fine until the damn pastry bag SPLIT right up the seam and started squirting out icing in various shapes and patterns. It actually looked kind of cool. There were thin, angel hair pasta-like bits of frosting coming out of the smaller holes and a wide ribbon of it squirting out of the seam. I tried to harness the power of the split bag and decorate a couple of cupcakes with the ribbons, but it didn't really work. I ended up frosting the remaining cupcakes with a spoon. Bah. I also sprinkled all the cupcakes with a bit of a blue sugar to match the color theme of the party.

For the cheesecakes, I replaced the full fat cream cheese with fat free and butter with margarine in the hopes of making them less greasy. It worked. I also beat the batter longer to make it less dense and maybe even keep the finished cakes from cratering. They definitely came out less dense and were nice and fluffy, but they still rose and fell, leaving craters behind. So I cut some strawberries into heart shapes to cover them up.

I then put all the cupcakes in laser-cut filigree cupcake wrappers to give them an extra fancy touch and arranged them on a tiered cupcake tower one of the other party organizers decorated.

They all went over very well. Most people had more than one and the bride's aunt was shocked when she learned I'd made them. She thought they came from "a fancy bakery in Brooklyn". I think everyone was quite pleased, brown velvet, craters and all.

How it All Began

I'm starting this blog with entries about what led up to me wanting to keep it. This post is backdated to approximately the date it happened.

There are two things I love more than may be considered normal: music and Harry Potter.

Because of the former, I check BrooklynVegan about a million times daily. Because of the latter, I'm a huge nerd.

Anyway! One day last June, I noticed the "Vegan Cupcakes!" link on BV, which took me to Isa Chandra Moskowitz's blog for Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World. I've been a vegetarian for about thirteen years, have considered going vegan many times and really like pretty baked goods, so I fell in love immediately and ran right out and bought the book. I should probably point out that I'd never really cooked or baked at this point. I was just compelled. I got my book home, flipped through it and was DYING to try out a few recipes. But for what? I needed some kind of event if I was going to bake enough cake to feed twelve people, right?

The event and inspiration came the next month.



Having absolutely nothing more interesting to do at work, I was poking around online when I found skull shaped cupcake pans on pushindaisies.com. First I laughed at the idea of gothcakes, then I had a brainfart: my friends were having a party to celebrate the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows! How awesome would Edible Dark Marks be? Very awesome, indeed.

I decided to go with the Golden Vanilla and Basic Chocolate Cupcake recipes from VCTOTW with the Rich Chocolate Ganache on top. For the cupcakes, I used half all-purpose flour and half whole wheat, canola oil instead of margarine and vanilla extract instead of almond or caramel. Since this was my first time baking, I thought it'd be a good idea to do a test run of each recipe. I did and all the cupcakes came out lovely and skull-looking. Fabulous.

So I got some green sugar and sour gummy worms (OK, I actually got all the colors, used the greens and ate the rest) for garnish and stayed up baking almost all night before the book release (which was just a splendid idea considering I planned on staying up all the following night reading the book at getting in good and late the night after since I had tickets for Gogol Bordello, who were just awesome, by the way).

Maybe it was the sleep deprivation, or maybe I just couldn't make good twice in a row, because almost all the cupcakes I made that night stuck to the pan and failed. I had skulls without chins and foreheads and some were just cracked right in half. Naturally, most of the ones that broke were the chocolate, which were far more aesthetically pleasing, since the ganache blended in with the cake and all you saw was bright green on the dark background. I salvaged what I could, decorated them according to plan and...they looked like a first attempt at baking. Not terrible, but certainly not on par with anything you'd see in the blog linked above. However, they were still crowd pleasers, so I guess that's all right. It was a start, anyway.