Jack-O-Lanterns

Isn't it amazing that it's already the end of October??? Seriously though. Crazy! For Halloween, I decided to make... CUPCAKES :) I never really got into the whole carving pumpkins/costumes and whatnot, but I tried to be a little festive with pumpkin cupcakes. They don't taste like pumpkin because I thought that was more for Thanksgiving, but they almost look like them:

And Marcus obviously had some fun decorating the pumpkins too

We have Jack-o-lantern cupcakes!!! Can you guess which one is my favorite???

Do you spy Jack the Pumpkin King? the pumpkin that's a basketball for Halloween? a pig? Ron Weasley? Ha.

Here's my favorite... Obviously :)

And Marcus' favorite. "He says RAWR!!!"

Root Beer Floats

Now here was an entirely new challenge... Soda in a cupcake. Seriously.

They turned out better than I thought. But I would've used more root beer :)

The frosting was an adventure too. I had to whip it up on the stove, with more root beer of course.
But it gave the little guys a very smooth look. :)

They were yummy. Very, very sweet.

Fresh Fruit

I made these cupcakes two weeks ago, and they were pretty good. Not my best, but you could taste the lemon and blueberry-- you can definitely see the blueberry too. I had never baked with fresh fruit before, so that was an adventure. Both the batter and frosting did something funny (which more affected texture than taste), and I blame my work schedule. It pushed me to go too fast in order to get to work on time :)

Emma

I had to include this...

Emma really likes chocolate cupcakes :)

Colorblind

Today I made cupcakes in honor of my Papa. I loved joking with him about how he couldn't tell the difference between anything red or green...

...So these are colorblind cupcakes :) Black and white.

Snickerdoodles

This time, I made snickerdoodle cupcakes in cute leopard print liners for Juliana's birthday. And I loved these :) They were cinnamon cupcakes with cinnamon frosting. Yum! And they even looked cute this time. Or at least cuter than the last time for just simple frosting. I always make Marcus choose the ugliest cupcake and try that one. That way, no one sees the ugliest one, and I know for sure if they taste decent. He approved of these. :)

I finally got a little better at frosting them!!! Hopefully next time around they're even better :)

Chicago was sad that I wouldn't let her get close to the cupcakes.

And I had these really cool candles that have different color flames. So I used those on the birthday plate for Juliana.

You can kind of see it in this picture.

YAY CUPCAKES.

I think I have a cupcake problem. Haha.

Taste Challenge

I've decided it's time for me to learn how to really frost a cupcake. I didn't want to just decorate the little guys, so I found a great recipe in one of my cookbooks and crossed my fingers. I wanted them to look simple but taste great. It was a cinnamon apple cupcake with cream cheese frosting. And they tasted pretty good. Sadly, frosting them was more of a disaster. So some of them just got sprinkled. Marcus said they were the best tasting cupcakes I've made, so we call it the Taste Challenge. :)

The frosting madness...

Getting closer to a pretty cupcake:

One day I'll make some truly cute cupcakes. But until then, I'll stick to the fun, colored liners. :)