extreme cancellations

two of my four orders this week had to cancel. one is rescheduled for next week, but the other is cancelled due to.. flooding of the missouri river! crazy! my client's parents live near the missouri river and are being evacuated so she's flying out to help. the poor midwest is just taking a beating lately! if cupcakes could save homes i'd have sent her off with her order. :(

Gradumication

My last two orders have been for graduations. It's been fun making tiny diplomas for the tops of my cupcakes! Here are a few photos from the 120+ cupcakes I've made:

It's My Party Cupcake: confetti cake with vanilla buttercream and my favorite sprinkles:

My "signature cupcake": Chocolate cake, raspberry filling, chocolate dipped raspberry on top. Chech out those cutey diplomas!

The are my Lemon Blast cupcakes: lemon cake with lemon curd filling and these have lemon cream cheese frosting w/ a lemon jelly belly on top

I made this for Cinco de Mayo and they were a huge hit, so now they're on the menu and being ordered, I call them the Chocolate Doodle: chocolate cake w/vanilla swiss meringue buttercream sprinkled with cinnamon and cocoa and a milk chocolate chip

Here is the Lemon Blast with diplomas and instead of lemon cream cheese frosting, they have a vanilla swiss meringue buttercream

This coming week I have four orders.. a graduation cake, minis for a tech event, minis for a bridal shower, and regulars for a summer bbq. I don't know how I'm going to do it but it will happen! I'm pretty sure this weekend will be dedicated to figuring out what the problem is with my vanilla cake, it peels from the wrapper. I've tried a few tricks and they seem to work, but the problem inevitably comes back. I'm also freaking out just a bit because I can no longer taste my own cupcakes.. I mean, I can taste them, but I'm starting to lose my grip on whether or not they're good, if the lemony ones are lemony enough, etc. I hope I don't lose it entirely! That would be awful.

Happy Memorial Day weekend everybody!

Fondant Covered Cake List

I had an order for a 3 tiered fondant covered red velvet cake that feeds 60 this weekend... decorated in the theme of Dr. Seuss. There were a lot of firsts for me:

-First time a friend of a sister's friend reached out to me for a cake (this was basically a stranger)
-First time I made a cake this big and covered it entirely in fondant
-First time I almost had a full blown panic attach in the middle of a cakespedition
-First time I forgot to eat dinner during a cakespedition

This could potentially be the longest blog ever, so I am just doing another list to explain how it all went down:

-12" square cakes came out BROWN. Not red. Curse you wilton no taste red food color
-Second batch of buttercream came out salty. Curse you trader joe's for having oddly colored butter packaging, I wanted unsalted, not salted butter!
-Started in on the round cakes at 5pm, wondered why I suddenly felt faint and starved, and it happened to be 9:30pm... ALREADY
-Brad came home while I was up to my ears in fondant.. which was stretching, cracking.. basically doing all the things nobody wants it to do (rebel) and I felt the beginnings of a panic attack but I stuffed them down (conveniently as Brad brought out the video camera)
-Design was ill fated, switched things up at the last minute and ended up with two cakes instead of one
-This was to everybody's benefit, as Green Eggs and Ham made an appearance, and it was amazing!
-Got lost looking for San Bruno park, despite it being two blocks from where my Grandma used to live
-Forgot my camera at home, so Molly kindly came with hers to take pictures of the assembled cake
-Everybody loved it!

I am not doing another one of these before the wedding.. it literally took over an entire week and I just have too much to do (like working out so I don't feel like a slob in my dress, and finding shoes that don't make me taller than Brad).

Iron Cupcake.. passing the torch

Ha just reading the blog title makes me laugh. It is mostly a joke. Mostly. ;)

I went to Iron Cupcake this past week after failing to place the month before. Last month, the theme was breakfast, and I did a coffee and donuts cupcake. It was a vanilla cake dipped in butter, then cinnamon sugar, topped with a coffee buttercream and an all cake "donut" dipped in chocolate glaze with pretty colored sprinkles on top (not a real donut.. this is a cupcake competition, after all). I was one of 5 people with the EXACT SAME IDEA. Hahaha. I had no chance, though I firmly believe mine tasted the best out of the five (it certainly didn't look the best though). I was kind of sad but surprised at how much I didn't care and how fun it was to just hang out and try cupcakes. A lot of them were god awful, and I'm not naming any names.. except to say a couple of those awfuls won. I think they had fan clubs in tow.

My Grapefruit Lemon Cupcakes

So this month was the citrus challenge and I was just excited to go and kick back again. I made a grapefruit cupcake with lemon curd filling, grapefruit frosting, rimmed with coconut and topped with alternating pink and yellow giant sprinkles. The cake wasn't very grapefruity but it did taste citrusy. The rest was bomb, but I had a feeling it wasn't quite stand-out enough for Iron Cupcake. Those hipsters want off the wall flavors (think vanilla-bacon cake with tangerine frosting and jalapeno jelly filling). I can't go for that. No can do.

I really like this new top, and I look skinny with all those cupcakes, bonus.

At the competition, there was one clear winner in my mind, and she happened to be sitting at our table. She made a key lime pie cupcake that was just fantastic, complete with a graham cracker crust. And it was actually a cupcake version of key lime pie, no cheating at all. It was her first time baking in the competition and she did an amazing job. I liked it so much I voted for her, which I never do. Ha! Mom even voted for her and kept saying she was going to win 1st (gee, thanks mom! ;) )Winner announcement time came around and I fully expected not to place, but I did! 2nd! And Ms. Key Lime Pie took first, which was so well deserved and adorable. She wasn't a smug brat like I was when I won! :D tee hee.

Mine is top left. #1 Key Lime Pie is center row far right.. you can NEVER guess the winners just by looking at them:

Next month the theme is movies, and so far my favorite Willful suggestion is: Sucker Punch cupcake: a hawaiian punch cupcake with a dum dum sticking out. HILARIOUS!

More Practice with Real People!

Today I completed an order for my first repeat customer. She contacted me for another bridal shower and ordered 120 mini cupcakes... I was so excited! Repeat business AND a lot of cupcakes to play with. This lady is very laid back and only gave me her color scheme to go by: lavender, lilac, and lime. AWESOME colors, but I didn't know what to do about decorations. I looked up the color scheme online and most people who throw parties in that scheme use a lot of floral decor, so I decided on piped flowers.
Lilac was not an easy color to achieve.. it is bright and dark at the same time. I panic when I see a ton of food color going into my buttercream and I'm not getting the color I'm going for. This happened with my lilac color, which I added to my already naturally pink raspberry buttercream. I stopped adding color when I felt I was not getting a lot of bang for the amount of food color I put in; taste over appearance, I always say. And they looked cute enough not to worry to much.

My lime was also not very punchy.. which is what you need when using it with lilac and lavender. But again, I couldn't justify adding a half a bottle of food color so I kept it simple. It did pop nicely on the purples, though.

(the camera didn't capture the green very well above) I try to decorate each flavor in one consistent design. Two cupcake flavors were filled, so I couldn't get too fancy on them. With minis, I do not carve out the center of the cupcake to make room for filling- it just takes too much cake out of an already tiny cupcake. So I dam up some filling on top and then pipe over it. On those flavors, I had to keep the decor simple. But on the plain vanilla, I had a little fun with my lavender color and piped pretty flowers:

It's hard to maintain a color scheme that doesn't include brown when you have a chocolate frosting. But I did my best to make it work.

And I'm SO EXCITED to finally have packaging and labels! It's neat to pretend I am official and use professional packaging and cute labels. Initially I was worried about these because it seemed hard to get the cupcakes out once they were in. I was actually almost in a complete panic about it, but then Brad came home from work. I explained my distress and he immediately turned into a salesman and explained how neat the package is because if you push the bottom up, the cupcake pops up for easy access. I almost cried with relief. He is such a good man! Especially during a freak out!! <3

So, there you have it. 120 cupcakes. It doesn't look like it though, right? Amazing how they all fit into those neat little packages!

Happy Easter!!

Wow

It's been another month and I have been so busy! Between the wedding, work, and baking, there's not a whole lot of time for writing. Plus, the sun is playing hide and seek and when it comes out on the weekend, I use the opportunity to sit and read in the sunshine. I just got through reading one of my new favorites, The Shadow of the Wind and am in the middle of the first Sookie Stackhouse novel Dead Until Dark and a completely different selection, The Forgotten Garden- both very good in their own ways. I never knew Sookie was such a trashy read! Love it.

As far as baking.. it's been off the hook. So far in this past month I have completed three orders- a baby shower, cupcakes for teacher appreciation week, and a kids birthday party- all with custom decorations. All together that was 12 dozen cupcakes. I have a 120 mini cupcake order coming up this weekend for a bridal shower, and a multi-tiered fondant covered cake order the weekend after that for another baby shower. There are two other orders in May in addition to a bridal show where I'll be passing out freebies alongside a Stella & Dot stylist as a ploy to get people to her booth.

All this baking has been a lot of fun and a great learning experience. I'm looking forward to my "launch" in the fall and becoming official. So far I'm having a lot of fun working through all the little things that need to be in order before my little side business is legit- what kind of containers to use for the cupcakes, what my business cards and labels should look like, how I will market myself, how much I need to produce in order to make a profit, where I will set up shop, etc. I've already run through a lot of this and have learned tons about what works and what doesn't. One of the more exciting things has been using my winnings from the Iron Cupcake championship in December to fund my new business account. It's all the money I have and I'm not touching it! Ha. Silly the things we hold on to.

So, I am just super grateful for all the practice business I've been getting from friends and friends of friends. Things are really looking good for a fall launch. Yay for side businesses!
Here are some photos to enjoy (or not):

Wedding Cake Testing (sprinkles will not be included):

Birthday Party Cupcakes:

Dr Seuss cake test (cat in the hat hat):

Children's Literature Themed Baby Shower:

Oh.. So Long 2.0

Okay that email you got.. well, it was the result of a fat finger. I hit what I thought was shift, and it turned out to be enter, and those of you on my email list got a blog that was started a month ago and being edited tonight. Hope you enjoyed!

I have been super preoccupied over the last month with some exciting things, such as the prospect of being on television(fail), working with a caterer and event planner(tbd), and booking new client(s). I have also been planning our wedding, which is one of the most insane jobs I have ever undertaken. I never wanted a big wedding and all the exciting things that come with it, but that's what I'm planning because I am thoroughly wrapped up in the "once in a lifetime" mindset. Things I never thought I'd care about: flowers, colors, chair placement... yeah, they are important now. I have a lot going on this year and sadly, the blog took a back burner for a minute. But I'm baaack. For now!

As I mentioned in my previous post, I made up my own recipe for red velvet cupcakes and they came out delarcious. I was very impressed with myself and cannot wait to make them again. Lots of people loved them and I got one piece of feedback suggesting they were chewy, and I'm excited to investigate this. I still think they were major winners.

The biggest undertaking of the month was when Willful visited and we did a test run of my wedding cake. 12", 10". 8". 6" alternating tiers of chocolate raspberry and lemon poppy seed... ohhh my (or as Edith would say, "such a white person's cake"). We ran out of buddacream and my decorating skillz we lacking, but the lemon curd Willful made for the lemon poppy seed tiers was to die for. She was elbow deep in lemons all day and it paid off.

To be completely honest, my lack of ability to smooth buttercream had me in a fit of rage, and I can remember clearly when Willful said, "I don't know what to say when you get like this." It remains one of Brad's favorite quotes of all time. Obviously, I "get like this" a lot.. I will admit it and it's not something I am proud of. So the fact that I had sane Willful and months of practice ahead of me made me feel so much better. I immediately did research on smoothing swiss meringue buttercream and tested out my skills the following weekend on a 12" round. The result: near perfection. I even took the opportunity to bake a less dense version of the lemon poppy seed cake and it came out great- and there weren't as many lemons involved! Score. The coworkers devoured both versions.. but again, they'll eat anything.

This past weekend I worked on a new strawberry cupcake recipe and it came out yumz. Fresh strawberries in the batter=longer baking time, but they come out moist and delicious. I had some swiss buddacream so I topped it with that, but I definitely believe cream cheese frosting is the way to go. Cream cheese frosting is the way to go on anything, though!

Next up: epic cupcake order and my baby chister's butterscotch birthday cake (in the same day!!)
Help.