Sunday, February 28, 2010

Pink Caterpillar

Last weekend I had a job for a one year olds birthday party. Her mom wanted to do cupcakes that formed a caterpillar that would go with the cute caterpillar invitations that they sent out. This was a ton of fun to work on and it turned out super duper cute!


Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Cakes!!

Just thought I'd share some of my recent cakes.

Birthdays and 1 Baptism




Monday, February 15, 2010

L • O • V • E

In honor of Valentine's Day but more importantly – Love.

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Show your Dog some Homebaked Love

Baking for your dog can be a real treat and your dog will love you even more for it! My dog, Paddington L-O-V-E-D these! This is a great recipe that makes about 30-40 snacks so you won't have to run out to the store for awhile.























Party Hearty Mix-It-Up Mix

from Three Dog Bakery Cookbook

You will need some cookie cutters, any shape and size will do. You will also need a rolling pin or something to roll the dough out.

Ingredients
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1/2 cup honey
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 egg
4 teaspoons skim milk
2 1/2 cups whole-wheat flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger

Preheat oven to 375 degrees

Mix together the oil, honey, vanilla, egg and milk in a bowl.
In a sepearte bowl, blend together the flour, baking powder, and ginger.
Combine the dry ingredients with the wet mixture and stir thoroughly.
Knead the dough on a lightly floured surface, roll out to a 1/4-inch thick and cut into shapes.
Place on a greased cookie sheet and bake for 15 minutes.
Cool on a rack and store in an airtight container.

These cookies lasted for a couple months.

Crumbs, NY

Crumbs
11 Wall Street
Huntington, NY 11743

Cupcakes tried: Elvis, grasshopper, squiggle and chocolate cupcake with peanut butter, white chocolate and chocolate mini chips

Overall Reaction: Let down of Titanic proportions!

















The shop is well designed with a cute logo and definitely has a welcoming, clean atmosphere, I will give it that. It was hard not to have googly eyes while choosing the cupcakes because there were so many amazing looking and interesting flavor options to choose from, not too mention – they are bigger than your average cupcake!

Once again, I had my New York taste testers with me along with my hubby. So thank you Kris, Kim and Steve for your solid input!




































Let's start off with the best one that we tried, the Elvis cupcake, which by the way does not say much. I'm looking online to make sure I have the flavors right and the cupcake we tried was made with different ingredients than what is described online. I guess some worker decided to improvise and switch out peanut butter mini chips for butterscotch ones. Basically the vanilla cake was yummy and the banana cream cheese frosting was great too but the butterscotch chips were so sweet that they overpowered the rest of the cupcake. The taste testers were divided on this one, half liked it and half didn't. I'm pretty sure it would have been better with the peanut butter mini chips instead.

The squiggle (hostess look alike) cupcake was a huge disappointment. The cupcake was bland and didn't taste like chocolate cake at all. The original hostess cupcake beats this one hands down!

I love anything mint so I was really looking forward to the grasshopper cupcake. The mint frosting tasted like mint ice cream which was fantastic but the cake, however moist it was, lacked that really great chocolate flavor. The mini chocolate chips around the edges was too much, they were hard and pretty much a mouth full, it would have been better with chocolate shavings or something like that instead.

The last cupcake we tried was the chocolate cupcake with vanilla buttercream topped with mini peanut butter chips, chocolate chips and white chocolate chips. This cupcake was a let down too, the icing was too sweet, the cake was a little dry and the chocolate cake was bland.

My words of advice: For a place that seems to pride themselves on that homemade baked goodness, their cupcakes definitely didn't deliver that taste wise. For $3.75-4.50 a pop, I was expecting a little more but then again it's a chain that keeps growing and the cupcakes are baked off site so eventually manufacturing is the name of the game and quality is left behind for quantity. We were all a bit bummed out and quickly lost our high even after all the sugar consumed.

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Christmas Goodies

So I realized that it was already February and I never posted anything in December or January for that matter. I was swamped with lots of cupcakes, cake orders and weekends of leaving town while my poor little blog wasted away with the hope that I would return soon.

Here are some of my baking endeavors that I did around christmas time.

Coconut Cake




















Christmas Cupcakes











































Cupcake Gourmet, NY

Cupcake Gourmet
46-I Gerard Street
Huntington, NY 11743

Cupcakes tried: german chocolate, funfetti and apple pie

Overall reaction: Gourmet my Butt!















While my husband and I were visiting friends in NY we stumbled upon a this cupcake shop in downtown Huntington. I had 3 other tasters beside myself, so thank you Kris, Kim and Steve for willingly volunteering!


















The German chocolate cupcake was not so good. The cake was super dry and the traditional coconut ooey gooey frosting was dried up too. Everyone knows that that is the best part about german chocolate cakes so this cupcake left us all disappointed.

Funfetti looked really fun but actually wasn't. The cake was dry and the frosting looked and tasted like play-do.

A great idea for a cupcake was the apple pie mini cupcake. The execution of the frosting could have been a little neater but it had a nice cinnamon flavor and tasted like pie. The only bad part was that the cake was dry, which seems to be a reoccurring theme here.

My words of advice: Upon entering store, it seemed like a fun place to host your kid's birthday parties – lots of tables and chairs, bright and eclectic colors, not as neatly designed but perfect for kids. There were all kinds of different flavored cupcakes to choose from but beware because they obviously aren't all good. Mostly I would have to say that they should change the name of the shop to Cupcake Not So Gourmet.