Let the tasting begin...

We decided early on that, no matter how trendy it is, we are definitely more cupcake kinda gals than traditional wedding cake extravaganza types. It's a very cute, mess-free and cost-effective way to provide dessert for our guests. The other perk to having cupcakes is being able to have a variety of flavors, mmmmmm :)

Out of the 50 bajillion cupcake cookbooks Kim owns (honestly, how many cupcake cookbooks does one girl need? Just one more reason to love her...) we picked a couple of recipes that a) sounded delicious and b) didn't seem like rocket science to make. Among the finalists were tiramisu, carrot, coconut lime and devil's food... Let the trials begin!

TRIAL #1: Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Icing
Kim was in charge of the cake batter while I ran to the grocery store and I was to be in charge of the icing upon my return. When I got back, one of the first things I hear is, "if we're going to make these, we need some other kitchen tool to deal with these carrots. I think part of my thumb is in the batter." First of all, ew. Second of all, I'm glad I didn't have to peel all those carrots.

Then there's the icing. So, I took a good bit of chemistry in my college days and I've also watched a good bit of Alton Brown. That being said, I should know better than to heat up butter to make it soften when it clearly says in the recipe "room temperature". That'll denature the fat and blah blah blah. Lesson learned. What I got instead of cream cheese icing was more of a cream cheese demi-glace. You'd think it'd be hard to screw up something whose ingredients were butter, cream cheese, vanilla and powdered sugar... wrong. So, we had a good laugh about my icing misadventure and I sat out 6 more tablespoons of butter to come to room temperature. Last night, I finally got the icing right and it was lickthebowlcleandelicious (how could it not be? you saw the ingredient list.) and the cake wasn't bad either. On a grading scale we decided that the cupcakes got an overall B+.

We also inherited some sort of Christmas apparatus that is going to be repurposed into a cupcake stand (I'll have to check my sources on this one, but it looks like it might have also been a cupcake stand in it's former life).  To the right, you see it in all it's holly, jolly glory. Below, after a little sweat, sandpaper and spray paint, is the new, soontoholdweddingcupcakes version.


The word on the street now is that we might just buy our cupcakes from a local grocery market bakery. A friend had them for her wedding and said they were delicious and reasonably priced. This also means that we don't have to stress about making 200 cupcakes the week of our wedding, wheeeeew. However, that doesn't mean we can't keep testing recipes ;)