I had a group of my very special Venezuelan family over to have a super Baking with Friends session and this was what we made! This recipe is quite simple: the classic red velvet cupcake with an additional ingredient, chocolate chips! Here are the pictures of our entertaining night and our creative fondant creations that we placed on top of the cupcakes. Baking with Friends at its finest!
Great with milk!
Here was the fun process:
Now for the fondant toppings!
This week’s BWF is a spin-off of a classic recipe. For the 4th of July, I offered to bring cupcakes for my friend’s BBQ and I wanted to do something festive and I went to the grocery store to get ingredients for a cool cake. We had just gotten power back from a bad thunderstorm that swept the area BUT this is what I saw when I went to the grocery store that morning:
Needless to say, I had to work with what I had at home. I happened to have the ingredients for red velvet cupcakes but I had red sprinkles. SO I decided to dye the cupcakes blue and use the red sprinkles and vanilla frosting. Here are pictures of the delicious result!
Hope you all had a great 4th of July weekend!
My sister and I made our first vegan recipe and they were a nice, fluffy surprise!
CUPCAKES
Ingredients
Directions
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Line 2 (12-cup) cupcake pans with 14 cupcake liners.
In a large bowl, whisk together flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.
In a separate bowl, whisk together coconut milk, oil, vanilla, and vinegar.
Pour the wet mixture into the dry mixture and whisk until just combined. Do not over mix.
Fill the cupcake liners about two-thirds full with batter.
Bake for 15 to 18 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the center of the cupcake comes out clean with a few crumbs clinging to it. Cool the cupcakes completely before frosting.
FROSTING
Ingredients
Directions
Using a handheld or stand mixer, beat the coconut oil until smooth. With the mixer running on low, add powdered sugar, vanilla, and 1 tablespoon coconut milk at a time, as needed, until frosting reaches a spreadable consistency. You may not need to use all of the coconut milk. Beat on high for 2 more minutes until light and fluffy
Both recipes from Chef Chloe
I’m back! I just finished my first year of grad school so my finals took over most of my time in the last month but I am going to make up for it by posting up a couple of new recipes!
First off is a new cupcake recipe that my sister and I improvised a bit! We made these cupcakes and icing in addition to three other kinds of cupcakes and icings: Lemon, Red Velvet, and Carrot. It was our mom’s birthday yesterday so we made this for her birthday party and they were a big success! Enjoy!
Cupcakes
Ingredients:
Directions:
Preheat oven to 350°F with a rack in the middle position. Prepare a muffin tin with cupcake liners. In a large bowl, vigorously whisk together the flour, cocoa powder, sugar, baking soda, and salt until there are no visible clumps (cocoa tends to clump up). In a separate bowl, mix together the coffee (or water plus coffee granules), vinegar, vanilla extract, and olive oil. Pour the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients and stir only until they just come together. The mixture should be thin and rather lumpy. Now add the chocolate and peanut butter chips (you can add as much as you like!). Ladle the batter into the cupcake liners, filling them about two-thirds of the way full.
Place in oven and bake for 18 to 20 minutes, until a bamboo skewer inserted in the center comes out clean. Remove from oven and let cool in the pan for 5 minutes, then remove from pan and let cool on a rack.
Frosting
Ingredients:
Directions:
While the cupcakes are cooking, make the frosting. Melt butter in a small saucepan and remove from heat. Stir in the cocoa until smooth. Sprinkle in about a third of the powdered sugar, stir, then sprinkle in about a half of the milk. Keep alternating with the powdered sugar and either milk or vanilla, stirring after each addition, until the frosting is the consistency you want, and smooth. If it’s too runny, add more powdered sugar. If too stiff, add a little more milk or vanilla extract. To pipe in a decorative pattern, scoop the frosting into the corner of a ziplock freezer bag. Use scissors to cut away 1/4-inch or so from the tip of the corner. Then just squeeze the frosting out of the bag onto the cupcakes in any design you like.
Makes 12 cupcakes
Even though there are a few step-by-step pictures this time, here was our final product:
Recipe from Simply Recipes
CUPCAKE EXTRAVAGANZA
Here are a few pictures of all of the cupcakes we made! We made over 60 cupcakes and they were gone pretty quick!
All together now!
Best birthday cake ever!
This weekend I met up with Michelle, my great friend of forever, to bake some plain vanilla cupcakes! They didn’t taste plain that’s for sure! We also made frosting from scratch and decorated our cupcakes with colored icing. We actually had a sweet request from one of the fellow BWFers for her sweetheart (scroll down to see the lovely final product).
Cupcakes
Ingredients
Prior to starting, get the eggs and butter to room temperature. Grease and flour two cupcake/muffin pans, or add cupcake wrappers to trays.
Stir together the salt, baking powder, flour.
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Beat butter in an electric mixer on high for 30 seconds. Add sugar and beat until combined.
Continue to beat and add the eggs. Beat well and add vanilla.
Add part of the flour mixture then part of the milk, then beat on low. Repeat until all of the milk and flour mixture have been added.
Combine and spread batter into cupcake pans.
Bake for 15-18 minutes, until the cupcakes are golden brown and toothpick comes out clean from the center. Cool for at least 15 minutes then remove from pans.
Frosting
Ingredients
Directions
Beat butter on medium until smooth in an electric mixer. Beat in the powdered sugar well until smooth. Beat in 1/3 cup milk and vanilla. Beat in the rest of the sugar and the rest of the milk. It’s now ready to frost!
Add 3 drops of blue food coloring and 2 drops of green food coloring to make teal icing! Place in a icing dispenser to increase frosting precision.
Final product: Sweet on soooo many levels!
(Props to Michelle for the awesome handwriting! and Steven for the idea!)
I frosted these ones!
(I got a little frosting crazy on the big ones)
Recipe from Squidoo.
This week was the last week that one of my best friends Cristina was going to be home for winter break before heading back to Harvard to start another semester in her Middle Eastern Studies master’s program, so I invited her over to bake some cupcakes from scratch! This cupcake recipe is incredibly moist and the lemon flavor really kicks in through the icing. The batter for the cupcakes is very thick but that is what makes them so great when they come out of the oven! Enjoy!
Be sure to check out Cristina’s blog too!
Cupcakes
Ingredients
Directions
In a mixing bowl, cream butter and sugar. Beat in eggs, one at a time. Add lemon juice and vanilla; mix well.
Combine dry ingredients.
Add to creamed mixture alternately with sour cream. Batter will be thick (as shown in the last two images of this section).
Fill greased or paper-lined muffin cups with 1/4 cup of batter.
Bake at 350 degrees F for 25-30 minutes or until a toothpick inserted near the center comes out clean.
Cool for 10 minutes; remove to wire racks to cool completely.
These (left) look like baby faces! And these (right) look like snowmen!
Frosting
Ingredients
Directions
Cream butter and sugar in a small mixing bowl. Add lemon juice, vanilla, and water; beat until smooth. Add as many drops of yellow food coloring to get the desired shade of yellow frosting.
Frost cupcakes.
Recipe from allrecipes.com
If you read my first post, then you are familiar with Steven, the “Ice King.” One Saturday afternoon, Steven, my Super Sister and I met up to bake some M&M bars and carrot cupcakes. These carrot cupcakes are incredibly moist and the cream cheese frosting is the perfect complement. The M&M bars are a great to-go snack and the peanut butter chips match really well with the M&Ms but if you do not like peanut butter, you can combine it with any other candy! Enjoy!
M&M Bars
Ingredients
Directions
In a large bowl, cream butter and sugars until light and fluffy. Bear in eggs and vanilla. Combine the flour, baking powder and salt; gradually add to the creamed mixture. Stir in chips and 1 cup of M&M’s.
Spoon into a greased 13-in. x 9-in. baking pan; spread evenly in pan. Sprinkle with the remaining M&M’s. Bake at 350° for 25-30 minutes or until golden brown. Cool on a wire rack. Cut into bars.
Courtesy of tasteofhome.com
Carrot Cupcakes
Ingredients
Directions
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Oil a standard 12-cup muffin tin or line with paper liners. In a bowl, combine sugar, vegetable oil, orange juice, 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract, and eggs. Stir in baking powder, baking soda, allspice, and salt. Add flour; mix. Stir in carrots.
Divide batter evenly among muffin cups. Bake until toothpick inserted in centers comes out clean, 25 minutes. Let cool completely before frosting.
Meanwhile, in a mixing bowl, combine cream cheese, confectioners’ sugar, and remaining 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract. Whisk until smooth. Frost cupcakes.
Courtesy of marthastewart.com
The first BWF event was hosted at Magaly’s house, one of the many beautiful members of the “Venezuelan Mafia” (see About section).
There were about 15 people in the kitchen working on four recipes: Red velvet cupcakes, cream cheese frosting, sugar cookies, and a lemon bundt cake.
Red velvet cupcakes:
Ingredients
Directions
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Line 2 (12-cup) muffin pans with cupcake papers.
In a medium mixing bowl, sift together the flour, sugar, baking soda, salt, and cocoa powder. In a large bowl gently beat together the oil, buttermilk, eggs, food coloring, vinegar, and vanilla with a handheld electric mixer. Add the sifted dry ingredients to the wet and mix until smooth and thoroughly combined.
Divide the batter evenly among the cupcake tins about 2/3 filled. Bake in oven for about 20 to 22 minutes, turning the pans once, half way through. Test the cupcakes with a toothpick for doneness. Remove from oven and cool completely before frosting.
Courtesy of foodnetwork.com
Directions
In a large mixing bowl, beat the cream cheese, butter and vanilla together until smooth. Add the sugar and on low speed, beat until incorporated. Increase the speed to high and mix until very light and fluffy.
Courtesy of foodnetwork.com
These are both easy recipes to complete but mixing the powdered sugar in with the cream cheese can be a tiring task but luckily Steven’s strong arm helped us mix the icing to a smooth consistency and because of his performance was given the title “Ice King.” After finishing both of these quick recipes, we iced the cupcakes and simply decorated them with Christmas-themed sprinkles. They were delicious!
Sugar cookies:
Ingredients
Courtesy of allrecipes.com
After letting the cookies sit in the refrigerator, we used Christmas-themed cookie cutters to make santas, Christmas trees, reindeer, ornaments, and stars. We used the leftover cream cheese icing that we made for the red velvet cupcake and turned our cookie icing portion of BWF into a competition to see who could decorate each shape the best. There were some clear winners, and some clear losers for each category (I’m pretty sure you can tell which ones won and lost from the second picture!)
Lemon Bundt Cake:
This recipe was actually a box recipe but it was still fun to make together! To top off the lemon bundt cake, we drizzled melted German chocolate over the top to add a delicate touch and a tasty complement to the lemon cake.
And here are some of the BWF-ers of the day:
