5. The One with the Baby Shower Cupcakes

It's a first...2 blog posts in one day! And on the same day as the Puppy Bowl. It doesn't get any better than this. (Seriously...I'm putting my computer away after this. No more blog posts today.) I know I promised this last Sunday, but my computer had other plans. And by other plans, I mean a virus, and by virus, I mean porn. It's a long story...

So, the baby shower cupcakes! There are two things you should know before I start:

1. I am a huge procrastinator, although I always have good intentions.
2. Everything turned out for the best. I promise. :)

The baby shower was for my boss, Jessica, who has become a wonderful friend of mine. We actually threw her two showers. The first one was at my house and the second was at my friend and co-worker, Alyssa's. Alyssa planned this really cute tea party and asked if I would be willing to make the cupcakes, since that's my "thing." I immediately agreed, and then immediately started panicking. I have only made cupcakes for myself, my family, and my close friends. I've never made them for an occasion before. Thankfully, I received three cupcake cookbooks for Christmas so I started recipe hunting. After lots of deliberation, I settled on a yellow cupcake with a pink vanilla frosting. I also decided to make a peanut butter cupcake with chocolate peanut butter frosting, since Jess loves chocolate and peanut butter. I also wanted to give people a choice, because, I'm nice like that. Anyway, my original plan was to do a test run of the yellow cupcakes early in the week to make sure they tasted ok. I've never made a "normal" flavor of cupcake before and didn't want to mess it up. I started to make a batch on Wednesday, but realized I was out of baking powder, so I decided to make them Wednesday night after a run to the store. However, my evil sinuses had other plans so I put the cupcakes off until Friday. The baby shower was Saturday so I decided to skip the test run and make the cupcakes Friday night. That way, if they sucked, I could try something else before Saturday morning. I went grocery shopping on Friday afternoon to get all the ingredients. At the last minute, I grabbed a can of chocolate frosting, just in case everything went to shit. Best decision I made that day... Anyway, Friday night was my chicken alfredo pizza making incident. If you didn't read about it, all you need to know is, it went badly. I waited for the oven to cool and scraped the cheese/alfredo sauce mess off the bottom. Then I preheated it and started getting ready to bake. My parents got me a stand mixer for Christmas and this was my first time using it, so I was pretty excited. As were Stella and Charlee...

 

It was around that time that my oven started smoking. A lot. Thankfully, I hadn't started mixing anything yet, so I shut off the oven, opened all the windows on the main floor, and was pissed that once again, I would be doing something at the last minute. 7am on Saturday morning, I was in the kitchen, scrubbing out the bottom of the oven for a second time. Once I had convinced myself that my house wasn't going to burn down, I mixed up the yellow cake batter and put the cupcakes in the oven. I started mixing up the peanut butter cupcakes when I happened to notice that the yellow cake recipe had called for three eggs...and I could only remember putting in two. Clearly, crying would remedy the situation so I did that for a few minutes, and then checked the garbage, where I found three egg shells. I thanked the cupcake gods for not letting me eff everything up, and resumed cupcake mixing.

 

After both batches were baked, I took a quick shower, did my hair and make-up, and went downstairs to make the frosting. At this point, it was 10:00 and I was supposed to be at Alyssa's at 10:30. The original plan had been to make both kinds of frosting from scratch and then pipe them on with my new frosting decorating bottles, but that clearly wasn't going to happen. I made the pink vanilla first. The last time I had tried to make a similar recipe, I had ended up with vanilla soup. This time, I had a consistency similar to, oh, I don't know, maybe concrete? I added milk like a mad woman, until it looked like frosting. I threw some peanut butter in the chocolate frosting I had bought, and then frosted both kinds of cupcakes. Then I picked out the prettiest 28, packed them up, and made it to Alyssa's by 10:38 am. I know. I was impressed too.

 

The yellow cupcakes

Yellow cupcakes with pink vanilla frosting and white sugar sprinkles. Yum.

I thought they looked pretty!

 

The verdict? They were a hit! I received a lot of compliments at the shower, and then more when I took the extras to a trivia night. My thoughts? I'm not a big fan of plain yellow cake, but I thought they tasted good! I don't really like vanilla, so if I made the frosting again, I would cut the amount of vanilla in half or use a different flavoring. I was happy with the shade of pink though. They were very pretty! The peanut butter cupcakes were fine. Very filling. I definitely prefer my other peanut butter cupcakes with the chocolate chips inside. But, despite the setbacks, I thought everything turned out very well. And now, I can relax and make some cupcakes just for me. So, what should be next? I want to try something new. Please comment below and give me some fresh ideas!