Champagne Cupcakes with Champagne Buttercream Frosting

Girls applying to business school generally know that they're signing themselves up for a highly male dominated environment. However, the true impact of that statement is not something that will quite hit until you're well into your first semester and realize that you keep having conversations about South Park and video games. Sometimes all you need is just a few hours spent enjoying wine and the company of the other girls in your class to unwind and not have to attempt to understand the male dominated conversations that permeate campus.

Hence, girls night.

I offered to host the most recent girls night as it gives me an excuse to try out a new baking recipe every now and again since I also really miss having leftover cookies, cupcakes, etc in my freezer to pull out when the craving strikes. The girls unanimously wanted cupcakes and almost everyone voted for these champagne cupcakes as well.

While they weren't the easiest cupcake to make due to the whipped egg whites in the batter, they still were relatively quick. (For those of you who try this recipe on your own, note that the batter is going to seem very sticky (almost like a bread dough) until you try to add the egg whites and then it will seem very clumpy and not well mixed. Not to worry, you're on the right track.)

The frosting has a great buttercream flavor with just a hint of champagne at the very end of the bite. I recommend making it at least the night before as the flavor does change a bit.

All in all, one very tasty experience and great for any party. If you'd like to make your own Champagne Cupcakes, check out the recipe here.

4th of July Celebration: Red Velvet Cupcakes

Everyone has been all gaga over red velvet cupcakes ever since Sprinkles came out with red velvet as their signature cupcake. I had my first Sprinkles red velvet cupcake about a month ago and it was good, but not necessarily $4 a cupcake good. Since I didn't even know what made up a red velvet cupcake, I decided that I'd make some for 4th of July.

I have to say that the ingredients of a red velvet cake are rather disgusting: 2 huge bottles of red food coloring, chocolate, flour, sugar, and some buttermilk. The red food coloring is particularly gross to me, so I'm considering making them again without the red food coloring and seeing what happens. All in all, this recipe turned out a very moist red velvet cupcake.

The frosting recipe that is also on Pinch My Salt's website was very flavorful, but turned out a bit softer than I would have preferred. Next time, I will add more powdered sugar to stiffen it up.

If you'd like to make your own red velvet cupcakes, check out the recipe here. These cupcakes also work great for a Valentine's Day surprise, but with the blue sprinkles, they were great for 4th of July.

I hope everyone had a safe and happy 4th!!

Chocolate Chip Angel Food Cupcakes

As you noticed in last week's post, this week's dessert was a runner up for last week's. Everyone strongly voted the Chocolate Chip Angel Food Cupcakes as their second favorite dessert.

The recipe for these was very easy to follow and the use of a muffin pan means that no special equipment is required since I'm assuming that most of you have made cupcakes before. I must say that even though I wasn't entirely paying attention when I made these so there was an additional egg white in the recipe and I forgot to add the vanilla. This is just one of the hazards of baking while on conference calls and doing 5 other things. Despite these errors, these cupcakes still tasted great. I used dark chocolate chunks for the chocolate chips and they added a great flavor to the light angel food cake. I am a huge fan of angel food cake so I really liked these cupcakes a lot. If you'd like to make your own, go here for the recipe.

Apologies for the very terrible picture of this week's dessert. At least there is a picture, but I'll try to make sure that it's actually decipherable next week.

Hamburgers for Dessert!

Unlike last year, Dessert Night wasn't precisely on April Fool's day. I decided that we should have a joke dessert anyway. Last year, I served a nice big flour pot of dirt! It was both really tasty and hilarious because people walked into the room and were confused by the flower pot on the table.

A couple of months ago, J had sent me a link to some very cute cupcakes that were decorated to look like a set of hamburgers. I decided that this would be the perfect desserts for April Fools Day as they look like little sliders.

To make these "hamburgers," you take a vanilla cupcake, cut it in half and then place half of a chocolate cupcake in the middle and cement it together with some red and yellow frosting to look like ketchup and mustard. I even happened to find some green sour airhead strips that looked like lettuce when you cut them into small pieces. The finishing touch on these master pieces is the sesame seeds on top. They really pull together the look and help these look like their real slider counterparts.

Not only were these a tasty treat, but they also were a great April Fools prank on your diners!!!

(P.S. Thanks for the comments about my terrible photography skills and often blurred photos. I'm working on improving this and possibly considering purchasing a better digital camera. In the meantime, my apologies.)

St. Patrick's Day Celebration & Irish Car Bomb Cupcakes

Yup, you read that right. Irish Car Bomb CUPCAKES!! Irish car bombs are one way that we celebrate St. Patrick's Day, but for dessert night of course I had to come up with an Irish related dessert. For weeks prior to St. Patrick's Day, I had been reading about chocolate Guinness cakes and other recipes that involved either Guinness or Irish or were somehow capable of being made green (that's the color, not environmentally friendly).

This recipe just sounded too totally awesome to pass up. As a lover of Baileys, the frosting sounded so amazing. It was a little sweet in the end, but given that the rest of the cupcake was so sweet it blended in nicely. The Irish ganache was so awesome! The flavor of the Irish really came through the chocolate well. Next time, I wouldn't have made such large holes in the cupcakes so there was a smaller amount of ganache in each cupcake.

All in all, it was a very tasty dessert night and a great way to celebrate St. Patrick's Day along with some real car bombs. After dessert, the crew wandered out to the Swinging Door for some great drinks. If you'd like to make your own car bombs, check out the tasty recipe from Smitten Kitchen here.

Spooky Dessert Night!

Given that this past Tuesday was so close to Halloween and I've been reading about cute spooky desserts all month, I decided that I should have a Halloween themed Dessert Night! We of course had to do the traditional activity of carving pumpkins so this was a BYOP (Bring Your Own Pumpkin) event.




I also learned that J has never had a caramel apple before!! I was shocked as they are one of my favorite sweet things. Every time I'm home in Carmel, CA, I go to Pieces of Heaven in the Barnyard because they have a wonderful assortment of caramel apples ranging from the most basic caramel apple to crazy caramel apples that have chocolate sauce, marshmellows, nuts and chocolate chips. So good! So I had to introduce J to a caramel apple (though he still hasn't eaten one because they took so long to set after coating them...it's a work in progress). Check out the tasty apples that we made.


Now for the desserts! I had a VERY hard time deciding between all of the really cute spooky desserts that I heard about. I finally settled on Vampire Cupcakes and Spooky Halloween Cookie Bars mainly because the Vampire Cupcakes were just too cute, and I really wanted an excuse to eat the lime green and purple (my favorite colors) M&Ms that were required for the cookie bars.


I totally cheated and made the Vampire Cupcakes with cupcake mix, canned cherry pie filling, and premade frosting, but it was really the final effect that mattered. You can see the "blood" oozing out of the middle of the cupcake here.

The Spooky Halloween Cookie Bars turned out great despite the fact that I was definitely not reading the recipe carefully when I was making them and thus made a lot of mistakes. First of all, I put the whole amount of flour into the batter at the beginning instead of reserving some for the white cookie layer on top that you make later. To fix this, I added additional flous to the white cookie mixture and hoped for the best. Next, I didn't combine the melted butter and the cocoa powder before adding it to the dough. Actually, I thought the recipe required 1 1/3 cups of cocoa powder instead of just 1/3 cup. So after dumping all of that cocoa powder in there (luckily I hadn't really mixed yet), I had to dump it back out and start over combining the cocoa powder with the melted butter. Luckily, whatever I did seems to have made the cookies better. They were so tasty!!! I can't even begin to explain and, despite all of the sugar and candy in them, they weren't that sweet.


All in all, it was a really fun Halloween themed Dessert Night.

Brownie Peanut Butter Cups

This week's dessert night was a rather last minute endeavor as our plane landed from our weekend in Colorado (the subject of a later blog) 5.5 hours prior to dessert night. I had not previously selected what I was going to make nor had I made sure to have the ingredients on hand before we left for Colorado. So I was looking for something quick and tasty at the same time.

I happened upon this recipe for Brownie Peanut Butter Cups in my Google Reader because I had no doubt starred it a long time ago thinking that I should save it because J loves peanut butter so. It turned out that I had all of the ingredients except chocolate chips and peanut butter chips already on hand. I ended up getting Reese's Pieces (small peanut butter M&Ms) instead of the peanut butter chips because I couldn't find any quickly at Safeway.

They came out great...just like they were supposed to. My only complaint is that they were MUCH too sweet. The brownie mixture was almost mixed with an equal quantity of candy which was just a little intense, but they do look pretty.



If you'd like to make your own, go here.