Chunky Monkey Cupcakes

Want there to be a party in your mouth? Then try these cupcakes. Playing around with ingredients one afternoon and having the flavors of my favorite breakfast smoothie in mind, I came up with my own Chunky Monkey Cupcakes.



Chocolate-Banana Cake

• 1 (18.25 ounce) package devil's food cake mix
• 1 cup mashed bananas
• 1/3 cup vegetable oil
• 3 eggs

Prepare according to directions on box.

Peanut Butter Buttercream

• 2/3 cup natural, creamy peanut butter
• 8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened
• 3/4 cup confectioners' sugar

Mix together peanut butter and butter. Slowly mix in sugar. The measurements for the ingredients are really only guidelines. I tend to adjust as I mix the ingredients together and taste everything.

Last step: Drizzle with caramel topping, the sit back, relax, and enjoy!

Eggnog Cupcakes

For me, one of the true marks of the holiday season is eggnog. So naturally when I needed to make cupcake for my office holiday potluck, eggnog cupcakes came to mind. For this particular cupcake adventure, I decided that I wanted to modify a cake mix instead of trying everything from scratch. This way I could save a little time, and cash.

Thanks to some extensive Google research, I found an eggnog cake recipe that uses a mix.

Here is the recipe that I followed, modified slightly to be made as cupcakes.


Ingredients:

* 4 ounces butter, softened
* 1 cup eggnog
* 1/4 cup rum
* 1 teaspoon ground nutmeg
* 2 teaspoons vanilla
* 3 large eggs
* 1 package vanilla cake mix

Preparation:
Heat oven to 325°.

Beat butter until light; beat in eggs and eggnog and rum. Add vanilla, nutmeg, and cake mix; beat slowly to combine, then beat on high speed for 2 minutes. Spoon into cupcake liners. Bake for 15 to 18 minutes.

The batter tasted to delicious!!

The frosting was kind of my own invention. I just wanted to make a simple cinnamon buttercream frosting. I used two sticks of butter, about 3 cups confectioner's sugar, 3 tablespoons of eggnog, 1 teaspoon vanilla extract, and 1 teaspoon of cinnamon. I tend to add things to my frosting depending on how it tastes. For this particular one, I think I ended up adding a little more vanilla which then required me to add some more confectioner's sugar so it wouldn't get too runny.

So of course I was making these cupcakes at the last possible second because I was trying to get out the door and make it on time for work. Unfortunately, I was a bad little blogger so I didn't take any pictures.

Here is an example of how I wanted them to look:
source: living artfully

In all honestly, my cupcakes were not decorated with love. My last frosting bag busted, so I had to frost them old school with a spatula. I did, however, throw some red and green christmas sprinkles on there to help add some color.

Enjoy!

A week in review...

Oh last week was so hectic! Even though I had quite a lot going on, there is always time to be crafty...

Last Monday, my mother and I were in the car and we happened to pass by a wicker armoire that someone was throwing out. It was sitting on the curb all lonely and abandoned, so we rescued it. It really was the moral thing to do. Eight, yes I said eight, cans of white spray paint later and voila! I ditched my old broken bureau and I now was a fancy armoire.

Please don't mind the mess around it. The photo was taken before I finished cleaning and rearranging my room. Which by the way, made me realize that I'm a HOARDER!

Here's another inside shot. I haven't hung up any clothes yet, but there's potential.

Unfortunately I forgot to take some before pictures, but originally the paint was all chipped and it was a very dingy, yellowed color.

The next crafty thing of the week was a gift. My wonderful boyfriend bought me What's New Cupcake by Karen Tack and Alan Richardson.


It's an amazing book with so many really cute ideas. On Friday I decided to make one of the designs that were classified as "EZ," meaning they were not only relatively simple, but they also only needed a few ingredients. The cupcakes that I made used M&M's to look like bake sale pies. My only regret is that I forgot to buy silver foil cupcake liners, as recommended by the book.

The book recommends cutting the corner off of a ziplock bag and using that to pipe the "crust" around the pie. I couldn't quite get the hand of it, so I cheated and used a star tip and a pastry bag. However I did use the ziplock bag method for the lines across the pie.

Instead of buying a bag of M&M's in a single color, which were really pricey, I went with two bags of the regular kind. I did get to spend some fun time separating the candy by color into bags.

Enjoy my cherry, blueberry, and lemon pies!

happy st. paddy's day!

As an individual with a smidge of Irish heritage, I decided to be festive. I donned my green sweater, green earrings, and obnoxious green argyle socks. I also wanted to make a fun and festive treat to share with my coworkers. I did some searching and just by pure Irish luck, I stumbled upon a recipe for "Chocolate Whiskey and Beer Cupcakes" from smitten kitchen. Other websites and blogs also refer to them as "Irish Car Bombs" after the cocktail.

So I diligently made my shopping list and I trekked over to the grocery to get all my essentials. I wanted my cupcakes to taste yummy, so I forked over the extra $.75 for the "good" chocolate. Sadly, my local craft store didn't have any St. Patrick's Day cupcake liners, so I was forced to go with plain white, but I grabbed some green sugar sprinkles to dress them up a bit.

Early this morning, I was ready to start my baking. I pulled my hair back, put on a special apron, and gathered all my bowls and ingredients. I even turned on the Food Network for some baking inspiration. I read through the beginning parts of my recipe and it suddenly dawned on me that I have never made a cake or cupcakes from "scratch" before. I usually rely on my best buds Betty Crocker or Duncan Hines.

At this point I was really nervous. What if the cupcakes were dry and dense? Yuck! The recipe had a lot of positive comments, so I thought that hopefully if I followed the directions to the letter, everything would turn out fine.

After three and a half long hours, I baked 20 cupcakes, cut out their cores, filled them with chocolate ganache, and then piped on the buttercream frosting. Behold the fruits of my labor:



I think they came out rather pretty! These cupcakes were my first try at piping frosting, and they don't look to shabby. I used a Wilton #12 tip for both the ganache filling and the frosting.

The only changes that I made to the recipe were that I baked the cupcakes for about 20 minutes, and instead of regular Bailey's Irish Cream, I used the "coffee-flavored" variety because that's all the liquor store had in nip size.

I definitely recommend this recipe. Those cupcakes were scrumdiddlyumptious, if I do say so myself.

Top of the mornin' to you!