Apparantly (According to the folks over at squishables.com at least, and I love their enormous spherical huggable stuffed animals-and-food-and-uh-states? almost as much as I love cupcakes so we’ll go with it) it’s National Cupcake Lovers’ Day!
To celebrate, have a quick ten in no particular order cupcakes-I’ve-made picture set – and hopefully ten eight topics for me to make posts about!
#1 – Chocolate-Strawberry Cupcakes. Chocolate cake and frosting, fresh strawberries and filled with a sadly discontinued chocolate-strawberry jam made by Stonewall Kitchens. I did the cool fanned out sliced fruit thing! I was so proud of myself!
#2 – Strawberry-Basil Cupcakes. You can read all about these here. I kept a cup of basil sugar stored in my freezer for a month after this and topped waffles with it.
#3 – Caramel Apple Cookies-and-Cream Cupcakes. Brown sugar cake, apple butter filling, apple-cream cheese frosting and then rolled in crushed caramel-apple Oreos, and drizzled in thick melted caramel. The caramel apple oreos have green filling. It’s weird looking.
#4 -Snickers Bar Cupcakes. Chocolate Malted cake, peanut-caramel filling, caramel buttercream frosting and then topped with peanuts, and chocolate and caramel. Caramel no longer looks like a word.
#5 – Raspberry Lemonade Cupcakes. Vanilla bean cake, filled with seedless raspberry preserves (from a stand at the local farmer’s market, I buy local when I can!), topped with lemon cream cheese frosting, freeze dried raspberries and a lemon shortbread cookie. The freeze dried raspberries are delicious on their own. We ate half the bag while decorating these!
#6 – Blueberry Pie Cupcakes. Vanilla Bean cake, filled with blueberry pie filling. Vanilla bean and blueberry buttercream swirled frosting, topped with fresh blueberries and a blueberry cookie. These were the cupcakes I made for my son’s first birthday party! My son picked all the blueberries off his giant cupcake, ate them, then ripped the cupcake apart and ate the filling with his fists. His whole face was purple.
#7 – Tagalong Girl Scout Cookie Cupcakes. Chocolate cake, with a tagalong cookie sunk into the batter. Frosted with peanut butter ganache, and then dipped into melted chocolate and chilled until the chocolate was hard. Made for my husband to take to his office for his birthday. He ate four. I don’t know how, they were so rich.
#8 – Sticky Caramel Cupcakes. Brown sugar/honey cake, filled with hot caramel, frosted with caramel buttercream and drizzled with more melted caramel. This cupcake launched a friendship. I brought these to Blizzcon 2013, 2014, and 2015, and a good friend of mine has managed to eat them without making a mess. I don’t know how! I’m pretty sure he’s actually a cupcake-eating robot.
#9 – Halloween 2015. Pumpkin Spice Latte cupcakes and Caramel Hot Cocoa. Pumpkin Spice have an espresso-spice cake, are filled with pumpkin pie filling and have whipped cream frosting and are topped with crushed pumpkin biscotti. The caramel hot cocoa are double-chocolate cake, filled with a caramel-chocolate sauce, and frosted with caramel buttercream with a caramel swirl. Caramel REALLY doesn’t look like a word anymore.
#10 – Christmas 2015. Clockwise from top left: Sugar Cookie Dough, Christmas Cookie, Caramel Mocha, and Baileys-and-Cocoa. You can read a bit about these here. I could eat that Bailey’s cream cheese frosting out of the bowl with a spoon.