Ah sugar, sugar!

I made these sugar-free bluberry cupcakes for a friend's birthday recently. The recipe called for the usual ingredients as well as the sugar substitute, Splenda. The mixing process was pretty much the same as any other except instead of beating butter & sugar together, you beat the butter & splenda. I coated the blueberries in flour before stirring them into the cake batter so that they wouldn't fall to the bottom while baking. That method worked really well.
When they came out of the oven, they were more scone/biscuit-like instead of regular cupcakes which was just fine with me because it looked just like the picture from the recipe and tasted great too. To keep with sugar-free theme, I topped each cupcake with a dallop of fat-free yogurt and a blueberry. I will try this recipe again using other fruit and maybe less Splenda.

Graduation

A friend requested a few mini cupcakes to celebrate his girlfriend's graduation from law school. I had wanted to do a graduation-themed cucpake for a while now and thought this would be a good opportunity. I wanted to create graduation caps out of mini-reese cups with a thin layer of chocolate on top, like these by Bakerella, but then thought it wouldn't go well on such a small cupcake. My friend had wanted to spell out the words "Congratulations, Nooreen!" so I figured I should stick to that. I made red velvet cupcakes with cream cheese icing, and added fondant letters on top. The color theme was pink and white. I tried to give the pink fondant a marble-effect. You can somewhat see that in the picture below.

I wanted to do something different with these cupcakes and make it more law-related. I randomly found this blog called A Baked Creation and it shows you how to make books out of fondant. I thought it was the coolest little cupcake toppers and of course law students have a ton of reading to do! I was told that the graduate's favorite courses were Torts and Contracts. I couldn't fit such a big words onto the small cover using my measly edible black marker so I just managed to write "Law" on it. If I ever make a larger book, I want to use fondant letters to make the spine and cover even better and more realistic. I also decided to do an open book and created some "scribbles" with the edible marker.

I tried to make the iconic judge's wooden gavel by mixing brown fondant. As you can tell, its pretty small compared to the size of the mini cupcake.

These are pictures of the cupcakes finished and ready to be picked up.

Eggless Chocolate Cupcakes

I made these cupcakes for a family of vegetarians. I didn't even have to bring out the mixer for this one, which made for an easy clean up. The recipe asked for me to stir the ingredients together with a fork. Some eggless recipes use condensed milk while others used baking soda and vinegar. I went with the latter and found a recipe on Cooks.com since it sounded less sweet.
It came out fluffy and moist and was a hit, even with the kids! I used white buttercream icing and topped it with purple sugar sprinkles. I will definitely make these again in the future.