Somewhere over the rainbow...

Happy St. Patrick’s Day! Being Irish by marriage, I felt it was my duty to celebrate this holiday with baked goods, because that’s what I do! (And because if I said “with drinking,” I would be getting AA referrals… especially from my hubby!)

I Googled “St Patrick’s Day Cupcakes” for some ideas. I found green velvet cupcakes, but since I turned everyone’s mouth blue with my blue velvet cupcakes in December, those were out. So I went for rainbow cupcakes with a twist. I decided to make the rainbow with my frosting, and my cupcake would be the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow!

To make the pot of gold cupcakes, I used my darn good chocolate cake recipe for the “pot”, and a yellow cake batter for the “gold”. I basically spooned some chocolate batter into the cupcake liner and formed a little bowl for the yellow batter. (Fortunately the chocolate batter was thick so this worked well. I wish I could have taken pictures of this step, but it was pretty messy!) I was pleased with the way they turned out, especially since I was basically winging it. Some of the pots were overflowing with gold!



I originally wanted to do a rainbow swirl frosting to top the cupcakes, but having never made swirls before, I wussed out because I was out of milk and couldn’t remake the frosting in case I messed up. Instead I just piped little rainbows on the cupcakes, which turned out cute!



Since I couldn’t fit all the rainbow colors on the cupcakes, I played around with the green and yellow frostings to attempt a swirl. I piped the swirl onto some cupcakes that I made with extra yellow batter that I dyed green. Pretty!



YUM!



Until next time, an Irish blessing:

Wishing you a rainbow
For sunlight after showers—
Miles and miles of Irish smiles
For golden happy hours—
Shamrocks at your doorway
For luck and laughter too,
And a host of friends that never ends
Each day your whole life through!

Peace, love and cupcakes,
Amanda

Oh My Ganache, It's Valentine's Day!

Dear Weight Watchers Gods,

Okay, so I fell off the wagon… a little. But it’s my favorite holiday and I haven’t had a single cupcake all year (apart from the WW friendly ones). So I’ll be having cupcakes… and some yummy food to celebrate the holiday of luuuuuurrrrve, and I promise on February 15th I’ll stop making excuses and get back with the program!

Love,
Amanda

Okay, so now that that’s done, I decided to tackle two of my cupcake goals this month that happen to involve the flavors chocolate and strawberry since they are kind of the official Valentine’s Day flavors.

My first goal was to make strawberry cupcakes, one of my favorite cupcake flavors. I have only attempted strawberry cupcakes once before, but that time the strawberries turned the batter pink, and as much as I love pink, I was going for more of a vanilla cupcake with strawberry bits in it.

For these cupcakes, I actually used the Sprinkles cupcakes recipe, and it worked! Woo hoo!

My batter:




Here they are, fresh out of the oven! Gorgeous :)



My frosting came out pretty awesome too. My strawberry puree was a bit thick, but I think it was kind of cool to have the little strawberry bits in it!

Here is the strawberry frosting on a chocolate cupcake, which I used for my second cupcake challenge, which was frosting with a chocolate ganache.

First I tried the ganache I use on my Chocolate Harvest Cake, but it was too soft and was strange on the frosting. I ended up using chocolate candy coating like the kind I use on my cake balls and it turned out great!

I hope everyone has an awesome Valentine’s Day!

Peace, LOVE and cupcakes,
Amanda

*Sigh* New Year's Resolutions...

Happy New Year, everybody!

Of course, with the start of every new year comes a plethora of New Year’s resolutions; promises made to oneself to stop a particular bad habit (or maybe to start a good one) that are usually broken by Valentine’s Day. Nobody knows why we put ourselves though this madness and I am no exception to it. Yes, I made a resolution to start Weight Watchers after my 12 days of Christmas turned into 30 days of cupcakes (there were more cupcakes baked behind the scenes of this blog, and many of them were eaten by me!)

So, this presents a problem to a baker with a sweet tooth. I plan to continue “real” baking, but I am trying to give myself a little time to really get into Weight Watchers before I tempt myself. I found a recipe for Berry-licious Cupcakes on the Weight Watchers website and decided to give it a shot. I was very skeptical that this recipe would actually produce something that I would want to ingest since I have tried a Weight Watchers cupcake recipe before that turned out horribly. (Fat free cream cheese should be banned from existence, or at least from the top of a cupcake!) But, I wanted to give it a shot for all the other “weight watchers” out there who are in need of guilt-free sweets!

Here are the ingredients I used to make the cupcakes:



The recipe called for sugar-free strawberry syrup, but I couldn't find any, so I used sugar-free Jell-o mix. It also called for real strawberries, but with strawberries being $5 a box, I wasn't going to chance spending the money on cupcakes I wasn't sure would turn out well, so I skipped them.

Here's a picture of the batter... the batter consisted of white cake mix, diet cherry Pepsi, egg whites and a bit of pink food coloring... that's all!



They came out very light and fluffy, although the cake didn't really pick up any cherry flavor from the soda (so if you are making these and already have Diet Pepsi or Diet Coke at home, there is probably no need to buy the cherry flavor, unless you just really want to!):



Of course, I wasn’t so much worried about the cake as I was the frosting. I like Cool Whip, but I usually hate when people/grocery stores try to pass it off as frosting. However, as I was pretty desperate to bake, I put my feelings aside, hoping that it’s pretty pink tint would help me forget about the absence of my beloved powdered sugar and butter...



...well, it didn't (shocking, right?!) However, it isn't bad. The frosting consists of Cool Whip Free, Fat Free Cream Cheese (I know...), Splenda, vanilla extract, Strawberry Jell-o mix and a little more pink food coloring. It is quite tasty, but, of course, can never replace buttercream or cream cheese frosting.

The moral of the story is that if you want an honest to goodness cupcake, just have one. However these cupcakes, at 3 PointsPlus a piece, make a nice everyday dessert. For someone who likes to have her cake and eat it too, that ain't bad!

I'm pretty sure I can't link to the recipe, so I will just post it here:

Weight Watchers Berry-licious Cupcakes

Ingredients:

4 oz Cool Whip Whipped Topping Free Whipped Topping, half an 8 oz container
1/4 cup(s) fat-free cream cheese, softened
6 tsp SPLENDA® No Calorie Sweetener
1/8 tsp vanilla extract
1/8 tsp food colouring, neon pink, divided (2 drops)
1/2 Tbsp Hershey's Sugar free strawberry syrup, or raspberry variety (I used Sugar Free Stawberry Jell-o mix)
9 1/8 oz regular white cake dry mix, 2 cups (half an 18.25 oz package)
1 cup(s) diet cola, black cherry flavor
4 large egg white(s), about 1/2 cup
6 medium strawberries, pureed

Instuctions:

Preheat oven to 350°F.

In a medium bowl, combine whipped topping, cream cheese, Splenda, vanilla extract, 1 drop of food coloring and syrup. Using an electric mixer at medium-low speed, blend until frosting is thoroughly mixed, about 1 minute. Chill frosting in freezer for 20 minutes and then transfer to refrigerator until ready to frost cupcakes.

In a large bowl, combine cake mix, soda and egg whites; add pureed strawberries and remaining drop of food coloring. Mix with an electric mixer at medium-high speed until smooth, about 45 seconds.

Coat a 12-cup muffin pan with cooking spray, or line with cupcake wrappers. Evenly spoon batter into prepared muffin pan.

Bake until firm, about 15 to 20 minutes. Remove from oven and cool completely in pan. Once cool, remove cupcakes from pan and evenly spread with frosting. Yields 1 cupcake per serving.

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If anybody makes them, especially with the SF strawberry syrup, let me know how yours turn out!

Peace, Love and Cupcakes,
Amanda