My photography skills are lacking, I know. It doesn’t help that I tend to make cupcakes late at night and by the time they’re finished I’ve lost any shot at natural light. Oh well. Still yummy.

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This cake is a two layer devil’s food chocolate sponge, recipe care of my homegirl Martha Stewart. For some reason the online recipe is different than the one in the book that I used, but I’m sure it turns out very similar, and it sure beats typing out the original recipe.

The filling is peanut butter frosting and the rest of the cake is covered and decorated with chocolate ganache. The flowers are gum paste.

It didn’t turn out quite as pretty as I’d hoped, but the BF didn’t complain!

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I also had some nifty Christmas cupcake boxes so I made some large ones as well. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find my big nifty piping tip (yes, that’s it’s real name), so I had to use a smaller round one. Didn’t turn out so hot. I topped them with plastic snowmen cupcake toppers that my aunt snagged me from some cupcakes she bought at a bakery.

The cake recipe came from my homegirl Martha Stewart, and the frosting was a peppermint buttercream.

Chocolate Cupcakes

• 1 1/2 cups flour
• 3/4 cup cocoa powder
• 1 1/2 cups sugar
• 1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
• 3/4 teaspoon baking powder
• 3/4 teaspoon salt
• 2 eggs
• 3/4 cup buttermilk
• 3 tablespoons vegetable oil
• 3/4 cup warm water

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line standard muffin tins with paper liners. In electric mixer, whisk flour, cocoa, sugar,  baking soda, baking powder and salt. Add eggs, buttermilk, oil and water. Beat on low until smooth.

Fill each liner with 4 tablespoons of batter. Bake for appx 20 mins.

You can also add 1 teaspoon of mint extract, but I didn’t want the cake to be mint flavoured as well. The batter was very runny. It seemed the right consistency before adding the water, but I figured Martha knows best, so I went ahead. It was liquid – you could probably drink it out of a straw. When the cupcakes came out of the oven they were sticky on the top, but the toothpick came out clear. At first they broke apart when unwrapped and I thought that batch was garbage, but I tried again the next day and they all came out just fine. So my advise is to have faith and don’t attempt to eat these until they’ve cooled for a few lightyears.

Peppermint Buttercream

• 1/2 cup shortening
• 1 stick butter
• 4 cups icing sugar
• 3 tablespoons milk
• 3/4 teaspoon peppermint extract

Cream the butter and shortening with electric mixer. Gradually add sugar. Beat the hell out of it for as many minutes as your arm can handle. Add the milk and extract and beat some more.

I am always amazed when cooking with shortening, because I remember putting it into the fry vats back in the day when I worked at McDonald’s. I can’t understand how adding sugar to fat is supposed to make frosting. But it does. The most glorious frosting ever.

The key is to beat it forever. Eventually it will lose the sugary texture and be all light and fluffy. Have faith. I’ll admit that I thought this whole project was going to be garbage, but at the end they turned out to be some of the best cupcakes I’ve ever made. Enjoy!

I would have preferred to have used a more glaze-like icing for them, but I didn’t have the right ingredients and my ghetto local grocery store doesn’t carry them. Instead I opted for this one, from Allrecipes.com.

I also used their sugar cookie recipe as I’ve made it before and it’s pretty simple.

They’re not my best work, but they were a request from my dad. And they fill up a lot of space in my massive treat boxes.

I’m not going to bother with a recipe, because come on now. Melt chocolate with some shortening and dip pretzels. The end.

I am too poor for a double boiler, so I heat my chocolate over a pot on the stove:

Then I drizzled some lighter chocolate over. I used semisweet for the base, and these weird half milk/half white chips for the drizzle.

xo.

I borrowed the recipe from The Hungry Mouse as I have made it before and it’s great. I only made two small changes: 1) I piped the batter onto the sheet for cleaner circles, and wanted smaller whoopies so only used about 1tsp of batter, and 2) I piped the filling in with a star tip so it would look a bit cleaner and more professional.

Piping the batter onto parchment-lined cookie sheet:

Pre-oven:

Cooked whoopies:

Completed whoopie pies:

Enjoy <3

1. Colouring gum paste. Aside from the fact that it’s the most tedious, dreadful task in the world, when my decorations dry they are significantly lighter and less vibrant. Not happy. In addition to my cartoonish leaves, I now also have some strange pink poinsettas on my hands.

2. Shape. I used Wilton cutters to get the shape of the leaf, but after I softened the edges and whatnot I feel like I have lost some of the initial detail from the cutter.

Anyway. For a first attempt I am pretty happy with them:

I also attempted to make some ivy, but then realized I don’t really know what ivy looks like, so they’re a little ugly and I didn’t want to share. I added some gold shimmer dust to these to liven them up a bit. I think they could really benefit from just plain old green colour dust, but I didn’t have any. So instead I have sparkly rose leaves. Take that.

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Pre-cut. The whole slab weighs over 5 delicious pounds.

Crappy photo quality because I couldn't find my real camera. Good old reliable Blackberry.

Recipe

Medium Blossom

Hydrangea.. Haha, needs work.

Gerbera Daisy

The whole lot of them drying

So that’s that.

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