200 Cupcakes

For my cousin Meg's 30 birthday I packed up my recipes, the Burrito and headed east to Baltimore. Cross-country weekend trips with a two year old are no piece of cake (pun intended), so I enlisted my brother to come with me. Leaving sunny 70˚ Los Angeles for a freezing Baltimore meant that I had to have my mum mail us our winter coats we left in storage in Cleveland after Christmas.

Once we arrived in Baltimore I discovered the party's venue location changed from Meg's husband's new bottega to our aunt's house because the number of guest doubled. That also meant the number of cupcakes we needed to make increased.

(For Meg and Adrien's wedding we had a family pie baking marathon instead of them having a wedding cake. Check out pictures here: http://hollywoodpiemaker.tumblr.com )

I decided on a color scheme (yes, for the cupcakes) of brown and pink. I made devil's food cupcakes with bright pink buttercream icing. I wanted to make pink cupcakes, but not use food coloring to dye them, so I went to the internet and discovered a recipe for pink lady cake that uses strawberry to make a pretty pink color.

I spent the whole day before the party making cupcakes. It turns out that I made nearly 200.  To be fair they were mini-cupcakes, and I did have help spooning them into the pans from my aunt.
It wasn't that bad really, making cupcakes is pretty easy. The really challenging part was icing them the next day.

Icing cupcakes can be tricky. It was February and cold outside, so the heat was on inside the house. This made for some runny icing. I used a star shaped icing tip to make the cupcakes look like roses. Unfortunately, that also uses a lot more icing than if I had just spread the icing with a knife. Also, the heat in the house and the heat from my hand on the icing bag made the buttercream essentially melt. It was very messy and not working out. Add on top of that an angry Burrito upset that I was paying more attention to cupcakes than her and you have a migraine. I plowed right on through, and decided after the first failed buttercream attempt to just move on to the chocolate icing and ice the remaining chocolate cupcakes later.

The chocolate icing was much easier to work with. The recipe I use makes the icing resemble fudge. So the icing is nice and rich, and isn't easy to melt. As you can see, the chocolate icing really did make the cupcakes look like little roses, or it did to me, but it could have been the massive sugar high/migraine I had. And luckily, there was so much chocolate icing left over after I iced all the strawberry cupcakes, I went back and iced all but five of the remaining chocolate cupcakes.  I even finished icing all the cupcakes early. Unfortunately, while no one was looking, Burrito managed to sneak off and "sample" some cupcakes. She got her hands on six before anyone noticed her. But knowing the messes I used to get into, I'm lucky it was so few. Everyone was happy to eat her all the evidence of her mess (really she just took one bite of each and licked the icing off). I think it was a little torturous for them to even wait that long. The house had been smelling awfully good those two days. I'm proud to say the hard work was worth it. The cupcakes were delicious, looked beautiful, and most importantly made Meg happy. And in the end, making sure Meg had a good party and an even better birthday was the whole reason I got on a plane in the first place.

The Finished Product

(courtesy of Sarah P.)