June Cupcakes

June Cupcakes!

So I took my first cake "order".  My neighbors were celebrating their daughter's 6th birthday and asked me to make ballerina cupcakes.  Since it's illegal in Texas to profit from home-kitchen baked goods, I asked her to just buy me the box mix she wanted and 4 sticks of unsalted butter (the things I always seem to have to run out to the store for).  These took me 4.5 hours from start to finish! I wanted these to be special, and I got to try out some new things.

Stats:

• Betty Crocker yellow cake mix
• vanilla and "Princess Cake & Cookie" flavored IMBC
• 1M swirl
• sprinkled with sugar pearls
• Cricut-cut cupcake wrappers

So I've been sifting my cake mix as per tip from cakecentral.com.  I've found that changes the cake almost dramatically from what I've been used to.  After 23 minutes in the oven, the tops looked fantastic!

It wasn't until later that I noticed the bottom rims were a little dark...I might have burned them :( Oh well...lesson learned.  I'm not sure if it was because these were Betty Crockers and I'm used to my Duncan Hines cuppies baking perfect after 23 minutes or what.

I finally had the chance to try out my new emulsion.  This is Lorann's "Princess Cake & Cookie" emulsion.  It tastes lemony with a hint of almond (in my limited palette's poorly educated opinion).  I added a teaspoon of this to my regular Cake Love IMBC recipe instead of any other flavoring.  It was AWESOME!  Very light and slightly citrus-y.  A little somethin'-somethin' you can't put your finger on.  Great for summer.

I made regular vanilla IMBC in pink in case the Princess flavor was not their cup-o-tea.

Here's one of the final cuppies all dressed and ready to party.  I love sugar pearls!

On Saturday I purchased SVG cupcake wrapper files from Visual Designs by Chris.  This was the one from the sets that was most appropriate for a ballerina theme.  On a side note, I'm SUPER excited about a new Cricut cartridge coming out July 1st: Cricut Lite Cartridge Cupcake Wrappers.

It was very annoying to have my Cricut grinding and buzzing away to make 24 wrappers.  I was able to fit 4 templates in one page of cardstock, but that's still at least 6 pages to do.  I did encounter some weirdness.  On the 4th page, the cuts started tearing in certain places and my subsequent pages tore in the exact same spot.  I changed the orientation of the paper and rotated the file and that seemed to fix it.  All I can think is that my cutting mat has worn out in that spot.  I went to Michael's the next day to get a new mat, but all they had were the 12"x6" ones.  Grrr!  Who uses those??

These disposable aluminum pans from the grocery store were perfect for holding 12 cuppies in each.

For extra cuteness I bought some ballerina scrapbook trinkets.  My handy hot glue gun helped me attach these to cut skewer sticks. 

These were inserted into some of the cuppies.  I guess I forgot to take a picture of that though.  Here they are un-flagged.

BONUS

I used my left over Princess IMBC to try my new bismark type for filling another batch of cupcakes.

Unfortunately, I didn't do it well enough.  It was my first time trying to fill cuppies.  You can see what's going on inside the dang thing!  I think I wasn't injecting enough icing.  When I bit into one, you couldn't tell I had tried to fill it.  I should've tested one upfront instead of after they were all crappily filled and iced.