Erin at Large

Cupcake adventure #4

Chocolate Cupcakes with powdered sugar and Nutella

Cupcake Adventure #3

Tiramisu Cupcakes--Success!!

Cupcake Adventure #1

Raspberry Lemonade Cupcake with Vanilla filling and Lemon whipped topping

The colors are bad, but the frosting is light yellow, the cupcake is light pink, and the whole thing looks kinda messy because it is. The Joy of Cooking is full of shit when it says you can just take a cupcake and twirl it upside down in frosting to coat.

Aesthetics aside (even though, really, that's what cupcakes are all about), this was a fairly successful first attempt. I caught my mistake of adding twice as much butter as was called for before I added any other ingredients (though not before creaming it--but whipped butter is all the rage, right?) and I resisted the urge to fuss with the recipe when I realized the cake wasn't going to taste like lemonade at all. I was sad that there's no actual citrus taste in the cake, so I added a little food coloring so it was at least pink.

Other tweaks included just using vanilla pudding make with heavy whipping cream as my cupcake filler (so freaking rich! It's perfect and easy!) and adding a packet of lemon jello to the whipped cream topping to serve as frosting. The idea was that it would work like stabilized whipped cream (a la gelatin) but have coloring and flavor as well. It turned out a little...chunky...but I think that's due to my flawed gelatin preparation than to the overall principle.

Clearly my frosting application technique...needs technique. And possibly a frosting tube.

However! These cupcakes are considerably more successful than my last attempt, years ago, which were not edible (pumpkin, with a cream cheese frosting *shudder*). These cupcakes are edible, tasty, way too rich and a pain in the ass to eat. The filling leads to structural integrity problems, and my foolish purchase of shiny foil liners means that they are actually double-lined and unwitting houseguests might get a mouth full of hidden liner. Oops.

I think that filled cupcakes are...problematic. In the future I might just do a chocolate cake with the vanilla pudding stuff as a topping, since it was fairly firm.

Plan for Cupcake Adventure #2 (which may be a while from now, as I am going camping next week): red velvet with a cream cheese or chocolate frosting. Possibly piped!

More Squishy Christmas Pics

ZOMG it's past Christmas! And I didn't send anyone cards!

Someday I'll be revenged. Someday.

Oh...was this yours?

I'm-a gonna open it!

Evil kitty.

Sombrita aka Golem. The eviler kitty.

Burning Kookooee

Kookooee, before the fire. The bowl it holds has monsters and scared people in it.

A little smoke...

Fireball!

Kookooee looking monstrous.

Just a frame.

The pile at the end.

And a hot devil boyfriend with an evil kitty. Eeeeevil.

Squishy! At about 3 months. He's ready for commercials.

Spain pics II

As always, my beloved Tio Pepe in the Puerta del Sol, Madrid.

The "watering hole" where we went swimming another weekend.

A million stray kitties at the Botanical Gardens!

Patio at the field house.

The Plaza de la Virgen in Valencia, at around 9pm when everyone comes out for the paseo. This is one of the things I love about Spain--everyone is out in the street and in the plazas every evening.

Fabulous Spanish fashion.

The view from La Bastida, an Iberian age hilltop site.

Action shot!

Valley view.

The undignified fate of some cardinal's statues...a view in a cathedral wall.

Spain pics I

The coast where we went swimming one weekend.

The field house. Nice digs, huh?

Sunflowers grown at the farm where our fieldhouse was. The first week we were there they had just sprouted. This photo was taken on the very last day.