The best type of bouquet!

As much as I do love real flowers...I must admit, I would take a cupcake bouquet any day! These were made for my Mom for Mother's day. I experimented with the flavour, wanting some fresh and spring like. I went with a cranberry orange cupcake with an orange cream cheese icing. They were a bit hit as our centre piece until we ate them!

Spring!!! In cupcake form...

Well since Spring is taking it's sweet time getting to us I decided to help it along with some Spring like cupcakes! They are a mix of my favourite flavours all with colourful spring coloured icing! 

Nothing better than having to choose between chocolate peanut butter, mocha, salted caramel or apple caramel to feel warm inside (even when it is still in the negatives outside!)

Happy Spring!

Happy St. Paddy's Day!

Birthday cupcakes!

This past weekend was our daughters first birthday party. The theme of the party was "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" which would make sense to anyone who knows our little girls appetite! I tried to re-create the caterpillar using cupcakes! The green icing is on the salted caramel cupcakes (a fan favourite) and the red head and extras are red velvet (another favourite!) Our daughter seemed to quite enjoy her first real taste of cake as she ravaged the "head" of the caterpillar.

The best of both worlds!

One of my favourite cupcake flavours (and the favourite of many of my family/friends) is Salted Caramel.  It's a light caramel cupcake with a delicious salted caramel buttercream icing. It is awesome. The only downside to this cupcake is that it doesn't help me out when I have a chocolate craving (which is pretty much everyday...) So, I was often faced with the decision - chocolate or salted caramel? Well, after some thinking I realized I didn't have to choose! I set off to create a chocolate salted caramel cupcake. I started with my decadent chocolate cupcake base and added some caramel.  The result was a super moist delicious chocolate cupcake with a hint of caramel.  I then topped the cupcake off with the original salted caramel buttercream.  This cupcake is probably my best to date (in my opinion.) It really is the best of both worlds!

Lemony goodness!

Lemon is usually a flavour that I reserve for the spring/summer months.  I don't really associate the fresh, citrus taste with winter but a friend asked me to make some lemon cupcakes for a shower she was hosting and I happily obliged.  I prefer hints of flavour versus overpowering taste so I just added a few teaspoons of lemon juice and lemon zest (I just kept adding until I reached the desired flavour level!)  They turned out well and even look quite lemony with the lemon infused yellow cream cheese frosting!

Who knew sugar free could taste good?!

I associate dessert with something sweet, sugary, even decadent.  But, that all has to change when you are baking for someone who has diabetes.  I was quite hesitant to use a sugar substitute, but since I did not want to cause any blood sugar issues, I did! It worked out really well - I just used a sugar substitute (in this case, Splenda) for the sugar in the recipe and then used dark chocolate chips in place of the regular chocolate chips.  These were mint chocolate chip cupcakes and they tasted pretty darn good!