Pint-sized Yummy Goodness

What is it about sugar, butter and flour that can bring the masses to insanity?!

For the trio’s birthday party I made cupcakes. I’ve always loved the miniature fanciness that is cupcakes and have tried to replicate it, with less than stellar results. Finally I found a tutorial, on pinterest of course, that gave away all the secrets of how to decorate cupcakes that look professional: A bigger tip. Seriously, that’s it.

I hit up Michael's the last time we were in Bing-ton and picked me up a Wilton Cupcake Decorating Kit, which has the 1M tip for cupcakes.

I was all set, I had everything I needed to make fantastically professional looking cupcakes. I even picked out some highly recommended recipes for Chocolate and Vanilla cupcakes.

Then tragedy struck.

I was pretty sure this was not how they should look. The chocolate came out way to airy and collapsed if you touched them and I forgot to add leavening agents to the vanilla. Back to the drawing board.

I redid the vanilla, remembering to use the baking soda and powder and they turned out wonderful. I then used Ina Garten’s recipe for Chocolate Ganache Cupcakes, even made my own chocolate syrup for it. OH MY GOODNESS! That is my new favorite recipe for chocolate cupcakes; so absolutely rich and delicious, without being too sweet.

This time things turned out a bit better.

I used the American Buttercream recipe, swapping out some of the butter for cream cheese {which I’ve never thought do until reading that post}. The frosting was delicious. I like frosting, but I’m not a big fan of super sweet sugary grittiness. The cream cheese cut that down so that you could sit there and just eat a bowl of it.

The chocolate cupcakes I frosted with my favorite Chocolate frosting recipe.

I broke out my new Wilton 1M tip and away I went. So easy! So fantastic looking! I seriously was in love! I find myself looking for excuses to make cupcakes now….not good!

For my tastes it was the perfect amount of frosting, but for aesthetics I think I could have piped on a bit more. Next time I plan on playing with the other tips and testing out what works best.

I found this while I was looking around pinterest and thought it was quite good as well :-)
I’ve never watched The Office, which I think is where it is from.

What are you favorite cupcake tips or recipes?