The recipe for these strawberry cupcakes from Milwaukee’s Honeypie Cafe calls for strawberry gelatin and a healthy dose of puréed fresh strawberries.  Jen Vernig, the one who requested this recipe, wrote, “This is my favorite sweet treat in the city…tasting so fresh and so delicious. I cannot say enough about how amazing this dessert is and how it represents the best of what Honey Pie does.”  This recipe might berry well be worth a try!

These lemon cupcakes with raspberry buttercream icing sound like a refreshing treat in all this heat!  The lemon cupcakes are made extra light and fluffy by using cake flour instead of all-purpose flour, and you can use fresh raspberries and candied lemon peel for some added flavor and decoration.

Ever heard of a cupcake crawl?  It’s the equivalent of pub crawling or bar hopping, except it involves cupcakes.  Basically, you spend a day or an evening visiting several different bakeries and sampling cupcakes.  Sounds pretty sweet, huh?  According to one cupcake enthusiast, a cupcake crawl is best done in a place where there are a number of bakeries to choose from.  Mandy Bekoin, an Illinois newspaper designer and editor, and her friend Sara embarked on a cupcake crawl in Chicago and came back with this tasty treat (and many others, I’m sure!):

The Twixie, inspired by the Twix candy bar at Swirlz Cupcakes

One word of advice from Mandy to aspiring cupcake crawlers?  If you’re going to be out in the heat of summer, bring a large, insulated bag for leftover cupcakes.  If you’re visiting several bakeries, chances are you won’t be able to finish off every single cupcake (sounds crazy, but four or five cupcakes is a lot!), and you’ll want to get your money’s worth out of the adventure.  When you get home, you can freeze the leftovers and enjoy them another day.

Sounds like a fun way to end summer vacation!

For those of us who don’t live close enough to Brennan’s (the New Orleans restaurant that is known for creating the original bananas foster dessert), we can get our bananas foster fix by giving this cupcake recipe a whirl.

The base is just a simple yellow cake recipe with a mashed, ripe banana added, and the icing is plain buttercream with cinnamon added.  The cupcakes are then rolled in chopped, toasted almonds and topped with candied pecans and a rum-laced sauce consisting of bananas caramelized in brown sugar and butter.  Use your own recipes for the batter and icing, and you can find the recipe for the topping here.  This sounds heavenly!

ATC reader Jasmin at 1 Fine Cookie shared these cupcakes with us that she crafted for a bowling birthday party. She created the bowling shoe, bowling pin and bowling ball toppers from cookies.  I am impressed with her attention to detail!  What a great idea!  And if you’re not a huge bowling fan, you could use a similar idea for your favorite sport or hobby.

Check out these elaborately-made chili cheese fry cupcakes from Jasmin at 1 Fine Cookie!  The “batter” is made of homemade french fries, and the topping is your favorite chili.  You can even add all the fixins…cheese, green onions and sour cream.  Now tell me, who said cupcakes were feminine?

Next time you’re at your local Farmer’s Market, pick out some fresh summer fruit, like peaches, strawberries or blackberries and try making one of these scrumptious-looking treats.  These cupcakes were made by baking half-size vanilla cupcakes in foil wrappers, filling the rest of the wrapper with fruit pie filling, and topping it off with a latticed pie crust.  Go here to get recipes for making homemade pie filling as well as more tips for turning your favorite pie into a cupcake.  It sounds wonderful!

Summer might be more than half-way over, but there’s still time for your kids (or you) to fit in some more books before school begins again.  I thought I’d entice you to do some more summer reading by sharing several cupcake-related books. Click on each book for a short review.

It's Raining Cupcakes

Tina Cocolina: Queen of the Cupcakes

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I love these ceramic cupcake stands!  They are classy, colorful, and just plain fun!

I still vividly remember getting my ears pierced as a little girl.  It was an event that I had looked forward to for a long time.  I couldn’t wait to wear my first pair of “real” earrings.  Do you have a little girl who is about to get her ears pierced or who loves to play dress-up?  This earring and jewelry holder would be a great gift idea for her.

My son is just six months away from his first birthday, so naturally, I have already been doing a little thinking about the big party.  I thought these jungle animal (monkey, lion, zebra and tiger) cupcakes were so much fun, and they look fairly simple to make. You can watch a how-to video here.

Looking for some new cupcake ideas? Maybe something a little more global?  Kitsch Cupcakes in Dubai is introducing several cupcake flavors specially-made for Ramadan.  Pistachio Praline is a vanilla cupcake with vanilla icing and just a hint of pistachio praline flavor.  Turkish Delight and Sticky Date are two other flavors that will be available during the month of Ramadan. A percentage of the store’s sales will be donated to local charities.  These look really yummy and could probably be easily made with a few additional ingredients.

These more masculine-looking cupcakes would be a great idea for your son’s birthday party, a bachelor’s party, or even to use in place of a groom’s cake.

This cupcake is said to be “undeniably one of the richest chocolate cakes you can make that isn’t flourless”.  Wow! Sounds like a great baking opportunity for all you chocolate fans out there!  Use this dark chocolate cake recipe for the batter and this recipe for homemade whipped cream.  You can even make your own brandied maraschino cherries, which are used both inside the cake and on top.  Instructions for assembly are in this article.

Yum!  This recipe for Creamsicle Ice Cream Cupcakes combines two of my favorite things: cupcakes and ice cream! Sounds like a great way to cool off from the summer heat!

I searched for some of my favorite games (both childhood and present-day) to see if anybody had come up with any cupcake ideas for them.  Turns out that there are lots of great cupcakes out there that were inspired by some classic games.  This could be a fun idea for a child’s birthday party, or for the next time you have friends over for game night! Be sure to search your favorite games…the possibilities are endless!

Scrabble

Candy Land

Twister

Monopoly

Settlers of Catan

One of my all-time favorite summer foods is watermelon.  It’s sweet, it’s juicy, and it’s good for you, so you don’t have to feel guilty about eating it.  I came across these watermelon cupcakes the other day.  Even if watermelon-flavored frosting doesn’t sound that appealing to you, you can still use food coloring and chocolate chips to turn a plain vanilla cupcake into a summery-looking treat.  Read the rest of this entry »

Got a favorite summer memory?  Maybe it’s days spent on the lake, a week at the beach, hiking in the mountains, camp-outs in the woods, eating ice-cream or snow-cones, or playing putt-putt on a warm summer evening.  Whatever it is, hop on over here and enter the ‘Savor the Summer’ cupcake contest.  Chocolate Moose in Greenville, South Carolina and Cupcake in Columbia, Charleston and Mount Pleasant, SC are asking you to be creative and transform your favorite summer memory into a cupcake.  Finalists will have their cupcakes available weekly at each location, and customers will vote for the best flavor.  The grand prize winner will have their cupcake permanently featured in Cupcake’s flavor lineup.  See complete contest rules on the contest’s facebook page. Read the rest of this entry »

Are you thinking about doing some decorating or remodeling around the house?  Or, are you looking for some creative additions to your cupcake shop?  One of our sponsors, Angel Heart Designs, has a nice cupcake chandelier that would be the perfect lighting choice for your kitchen, breakfast area, daughter’s room, or any room for that matter!

You can choose between a gold or white fixture, and the cupcakes are interchangeable if you decide that a change of flavors is in order!

I love the cozy look of this chandelier.  It would definitely give a sense of warmth to your home or bakery!

Owners of Lucky Penny Cupcakes on Prince Edward Island have some creative cupcake arrangements and ideas.

The cupcake bouquet:

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These orange dreamcreamsicle cupcakes look like a great summer treat!  The recipe comes from Nigella Lawson’s book, How to Be a Domestic Goddess.

The owners of Batter Up Cupcakes in San Diego, California have combined two of their passions: baseball and cupcakes.  Their baseball-themed cupcake store offers two main sets of flavors: “the home team” (those flavors offered daily) and “the visiting team” (those flavors that are rotated throughout the week).  “The home team” includes popular flavors like chocolate, vanilla and red velvet, while “the visiting team” boasts such specialties as bananas foster, cookies & cream, strawberry shortstop, and caramel apple pie.  I don’t know about you, but these pictures sure make my mouth water!

Do you have any local cupcake stores with interesting themes?

Caramel Apple Pie

Cookies & Cream

Bananas Foster

You can find the recipe to these cherry cheesecake cupcakes here.  The cupcake will sink after being baked, creating the perfect spot for the cherries and cherry pie filling.  Of course, you can use other types of pie filling, too, depending on your preference.  Check out this past ATC article, too, for another twist on the cheesecake cupcake.

10-year-old Lauren Crawford from Naples, Florida is a cupcake entrepreneur.  She invented a cake in a cup (which is not technically a cupcake, hence the name of her business “Notta Cupcake”) that can be made in 3 minutes in the microwave. She and her Mom have teamed up to make organic cupcake kits that they sell online and at the Green Market in Naples.  Each kit contains cake mix, chocolate chips, icing and instructions, and each package goes into a brown ceramic cup, which bears their own logo in pink lettering.  Lauren says her product is great for those late-night chocolate cravings, since it can be ready in less than five minutes! Visit her website to find out more and to order her product.  Sounds like a pretty sweet idea to me!

In case you need more patriotic ideas for your 4th of July celebration on Monday, here’s a fun cupcake recipe.