My Little Bakeshop

My friends seem most interested in my baking projects, so I will share my latest one.  For the company BBQ, I ended up making chocolate chip cupcakes with vanilla buttercream frosting.

Chocolate Chip Cupcakes with Vanilla Buttercream

This Martha Stewart recipe was a lot more effort than I initially thought it would be.  The cupcake turned out a little more like a pound cake, despite folding in beaten egg whites into the cake batter.  My cupcakes are usually soft & moist.  I brought only 2 dozen cupcakes to the BBQ and I didn't see any left over.

I didn't end up baking lemon meringue cupcakes for my boss because I spent most of my Sunday baking a Black Forest Cake for my mother-in-law's birthday.  It didn't work out the way I wanted to.  First of all, I used silicone cake pans and totally forgot to grease/flour them before pouring batter into them.  So the cake stuck to the pan.  Not giving up, I carefully scraped the cakes out of the pans.  With the two thin layers of cake, I slopped on the cherry pie filling and whipped cream.  To make a long story short, it was quite an ugly cake (hence, no pictures of it here!).  I was running out of time and my hubby wrote "happy birthday" with a store-bought icing tube.  Since it didn't have enough time to chill and it was hot day, the cake was leaning to one side and the "happy birthday" was running off the cake by the time we served it.  (It was horrendous!!!)  Oh, well.  I hope she appreciated the thought.  :|  I thought it tasted pretty good.  I have made my recipe corrections for my next attempt at Black Forest Cake.

Next Saturday we're celebrating four birthdays at my aunt's house.  hmmm ... what would Brian Boitano make?  (One of my favourite Food Network shows)  I think I will attempt the hamburger cupcakes.