Decorating Cupcakes

It has been quite a long while since I posted on here. Work and school have been taking up the majority of my life, thus there has not been much time for posting, much less for going and doing stuff worthy of taking pictures! This week though was finals week for the summer semester, and also my friend Brittany is hosting a bridal shower. She asked me to make her some "fancy cupcakes" for the shower, and I obliged. I had the initial idea to do chocolate, vanilla, and chocolate mint cupcakes, and Brittany requested a berry cupcake. I called both Miriam and Sally to get ideas on a berry cupcake, and also to try and learn how to make a cupcake beautiful. They were both extremely helpful, and Sal texted and emailed me lots of information that she found during her shopping trips and internet browsing. After borrowing, buying, and finding substitutes for the right tools and ingredients, I believe that I was pretty successful.

These are the Blueberries and Cream cupcakes, recipe courtesy of Sally.

As you can see, the cream cheese icing was pretty soft and did not keep it's form that well. But with the Wilton cupcake decorating technique that Sal found, they still turned out ok, I think.They are super delicious, too!!!

These are the chocolate peppermint cupcakes with buttercream icing before I added sprinkles.

You are supposed to use a 1M tip, but I just had a regular 21 star tip. It worked the same, just smaller.

The chocolate (in purple wrappers) and chocolate peppermint (in silver wrappers) after they were decorated. The brides colors are dark purple and silver. I thought I had found an entire package of dark purple cupcake wrappers at Wal-Mart, but when I got home and opened them, it was a multi-color pack with 7 of each color. Since I was making 10 cupcakes of each flavor, it almost worked out.

The plain vanilla cupcakes.

I was pretty excited to find silver sprinkles, or as they are called, "Cupcake Gems."

 I couldn't find regular purple sprinkles either, but instead found this edible confetti type stuff. It actually worked pretty well, I thought.

 I kept the peppermint cupcakes separate for fear they might make the rest of them taste. Those were definitely interesting to make. I don't like mint or peppermint, but I had the idea to make them and, of course, needed to do a trial batch to make sure it worked. I originally tried using Miriam's Young Living Essential Peppermint Oil as the flavoring in Whacky Chocolate Cake. I used pretty much the entire little sample bottle of oil that she had sent me and you could barely taste the peppermint. Jason couldn't even tell they were mint  (he doesn't like mint either) and ate several of them. (After I put them in the freezer though, the mint flavor became more pronounced. Strange.) Since the first batch didn't turn out as I wanted, I went and bought some peppermint LorAnn Oil and used that in the final batch. The bottle doesn't have a nice little drop spout, so it may have gotten a little bit to much flavoring. When I tried a cupcake to make sure it worked, it was definitely peppermint! I was afraid I had overdone it, but with the buttercream icing on top (with no flavoring) I think it balanced out well.

I will be delivering the cupcakes to the party this morning and hopefully will hear a report later of how everything tasted. Particularly the peppermint chocolate ones!!!