Cupcake Camp?  Are you kidding?  My parents made me go to church camp!  (Not that there’s anything wrong with church camp — but we sure didn’t get cupcakes!)  Cupcake Camp DC 2010 will be held on the rooftop of the Zoso Flats building at 1025 N. Filmore Street in Arlington, Virginia on Saturday, September 18th.  The event plans to run from 3 to 5:30 p.m. Attendance is free … and get this … you get to eat cupcakes … free ones … I know, too good to be true, right?  I am so there!  Some people bring cupcakes, and some people show up just to eat them!

There are few comfort foods as efficiently comforting as cheesecake. 

That might be why St. Louis Today choose to feature cheesecake cupcakes on Saturday! 

Check out how simple this is:

You will need:  15 to 18 vanilla wafers, 2 (8-ounce) packages of cream cheese (softened), 2 eggs, 3/4 cup granulated sugar, 1 tablespoon vanilla, 1 (21-ounce) can cherry or blueberry pie filling

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Place cupcake liners in muffin tins, Read the rest of this entry »

Check out AliCakes Blog, where she shows off her Tiffany cupcakes! 

Helping to decorate for her friend Tiffany’s bridal shower, she thought, 

why not create some Tiffany & Co. themed cupcakes for table centerpieces!   

  And what a great idea it was! 

Check these out! 

You’ve got to see this to appreciate it.  HeatherLynn already told you about this video a few days ago, but I just found a “sneak peek” that I was able to embed.  The lovely Katy Perry with giant cupcakes on her bra.  The infamous Snoop Dogg in a cupcake suit.  What is California coming to?  I don’t know, but it sure looks yummy!  (And I just can’t stop singing the song!)

View the full music video here!

 This post might be a little PG-13.  Recently, two of our faithful ATC readers sent in pictures of their tattoos, each of which were, ahem, in, ahem, some interesting places.

About this one, Michael wrote:  A bunch of my friends and I were sitting around talking about silly tattoos. I offered the idea of getting a cupcake scuba diving right in my groin area. I went home later that night and drew the concept on the back of my Macy’s bill … It’s a great conversation starter!

And Jamie writes that these tattoos serve as her conscience!

I don’t know why I haven’t thought of this before, but of course we can have cupcakes for breakfast!  Just call them something else!

According to SeriousEats.com, these cute little cakelets make the perfect brunch!

Brown Sugar Breakfast Cakelets

-makes 12-
Adapted from The Improvisational Cook

Ingredients

1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, melted
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 plus 1/8 teaspoon kosher salt
2 large eggs, preferably room temperature
1 cup packed brown sugar
1/4 cup whole milk mixed with 1/4 cup plain yogurt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Procedure

1. Preheat the oven to 350°. Grease and flour a standard 12-cup muffin tin (you can use a bit of the melted flour and a teaspoon or two of the flour to do this).

2. Put the flour, baking powder, and salt in a bowl and whisk well to combine thoroughly.

3. Crack the eggs into a bowl and whisk until blended and frothy. Whisk in the sugar and beat until well blended, about 1 minute.

4. Whisk the flour mixture into the egg-sugar mixture, using as few strokes as possible and stopping just before the two are fully combined. Then whisk in the milk-yogurt mixture, the melted butter, and the vanilla. Pour the batter into the muffin tin; each well will be a little more than half full.

5. Bake for 15 minutes, or until a tester emerges clean. Set the muffin tin on a rack for 1 minute and then use a knife to flip each cakelet sideways in its well to cool completely.

Brown Sugar Cream Cheese Frosting

Ingredients

4 ounces cream cheese, at room temperature
1/4 cup brown sugar
2 tablespoons plain yogurt

Procedure

Beat all ingredients together until uniformly combined, soft, and fluffy. Use immediately or store in refrigerator.

Check out these cute velour pants

embellished with a crystal cupcake,

available at Spoiled Brat.

A little pricey, ringing in at £155.00, which is about $225,

but it might be worth it to get to wear a sparkly cupcake on your hip?

Two of my guilty pleasures are joining forces:  Cupcakes and Farmville.

Farmville is the great time-sucking application on Facebook.  It is a seemingly simple game which gifts you with a virtual farm, on which you can design your avatar, buy a puppy that will follow you around, and then you can plant and harvest your own crops.  I avoid real life tasks I should be doing by planting virtual coffee, lilacs, carrots, and pumpkins.

The game is ridiculously popular.  Farmville has over 82.4 million active users.  That’s more than 1% of the entire world population.  The game started one year ago today, and in celebration of the birthday, the newest crop in Farmville’s lineup is … you guessed it!  Cupcakes!  I can now plant cupcake seeds, and 8 hours, later, I can harvest them!  Could it get any better?

Here’s my (beautiful and virtually yummy) first crop:

The third season of HBO’s award-winning vampire drama premiered this past Sunday,

and cupcakers did what they do best! 

They celebrated in sweetness!

The Sweetness Bakeshop in South Miami, Florida

served up these True Blood tasty treats:

And an ATC fan sent in this picture of her very own Red Velvet True Blood creation:

(Thanks Emily!)

On Sunday, the LA Times paid tribute to beautiful cupcakes by posting a gallery of gorgeous cupcake images!

Here’s my favorite:

Or maybe this one is my favorite:

I just love it when cupcakes get the attention they deserve!

 Check the rest of them out here!

Southbank Centre, an arts and culture center in London, recently spearheaded a new project of interest to us cupcake-lovers:  Poetry Cupcakes!

GPS, otherwise known as Global Poetry System, is a Southbank Centre project that tries to explore and map the poetry of the world.  The project is built on the idea that poetry is all around us, from gravestones to graffiti.  GPS invites people to take a fresh look at where they are and to find the poetry that inspires them.

And today I have:  poetry on a cupcake.  The project has earned a nickname:  Poetry Digest!  Ha!  Get it?  Digest!

Why didn’t my English teachers think of this?

I’m really not sure what to make of this:

Or this:

 but these creative cupcakes were entries in Washington D.C.’s Hello Cupcake‘s “Design Your D.C.” cupcake challenge.

 The top one was titled “Foggy Bottom,” while the bottom one was called, “Bo and Michelle Obama’s Organic Garden Cupcake.”

Hmm… that’s some food for thought.  If you dare to eat it.

But it was all in good fun, as a panel of judges chose winners for:  most creative use of fondant; most likely to be eaten; best use of theme; and best-designed political statement.

The winner of the “best overall cupcake design” was awarded a Kitchen Aid Stand Mixer, while the other winners were awarded Kitchen Aid Hand Mixers.

Want to see the grand prize winner? 

Here she is:

 This one was simply called “Chinatown Cupcake” and it was also awarded the most likely to be eaten ribbon.

Oh My Cupcakes! of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, sponsored a cupcake eating contest on June 5th.  Oh My Cupcakes! is Sioux Falls’ first and only gourmet cupcakery.

Contestants were challenged to eat as many cupcakes as they could in 30 seconds.  The five winners each received a sugar buzz and a pair of tickets to see Sugarland in an upcoming concert.

These are so cool!  Oh my gosh, I just have to try this!  I don’t have much of a green thumb, but these “plants,” I can handle!

 KansasCity.com featured a post recently on these delightful flowerpot cupcakes!

We have Bernard Shondell of Roeland Park to thank for these tasty works of art.  If you’d like to try to create your own, here are his words of advice:

I love to read blogs, but they don’t usually make me cry.  Then enter Love in the Time of Cupcakes!  Darn her, she pulled on my cupcake strings!

Mary T. Wagner is the author of two books, Running with Stilettos and Heck on Heels.  She’s a mother of four and an attorney, and yet she somehow still manages to write the touching and tear-jerking blog, Running with Stilettos.

In her essay Love in the Time of Cupcakes, Mary shares how, even though she was a busy career mom, she always made time to celebrate her children’s lives, and to be involved through cupcakes.  She made two dozen “ghost cupcakes” for each of her three children in grammar school to help celebrate Halloween.  Each tennis season, she made “tennis ball cupcakes” for her son’s and daughter’s teams.  (She bemoans the fact that the girls would scream with delight at the cupcakes’ cuteness, but the boys would just inhale them!)  This essay celebrates mothering and cupcaking at the same time, and was so beautiful that, even this early in the morning, I’m thinking of going to wake up my daughter.  She won’t mind when I tell her we’re going to make some cupcakes!

Now this is a cupcaking event! They do things big in Texas, especially at Sugar Mama’s Bakeshop in Austin.

Jess Pryles, of Sugadeaux Cupcakes in Melbourne, Australia, will be visiting the Lone Star State this month! Sugadeaux’s motto is, if you’re going to indulge, you should do it properly.

Debating whether to make the trip across town, or across Texas?  Check out Sugar Mama’s ratings on Yelp!  There are a lot of Sugar Mama fanatics out there!  One happy customer wrote, “Sugar Mama’s is a cupcake lover’s dream come true.”  Oh, how sweet.

Inc. Magazine just published a slideshow featuring the 16 best industries for starting a business right now. And among home health care and green technologies, there sits our good friend the cupcake! According to Inc., bakeries and pastry shops are growing at a rate of 5% per year! It seems that people are looking for affordable indulgences these days, and of course, cupcakes satisfy this craving for simple luxury! Cupcakes, and other small treats, are also easy to make locally, from local ingredients, by local people. Consumers are looking to support just this sort of business! Is today the day to open up your own cupcake shop?

Chicago’s Bleeding Heart Bakery has just released a new book of recipes titled Who You Callin’ Cupcake? You can get yours at Amazon for only $10.85 plus shipping.  Not much to pay for 75 recipes that are going to reinvent the cupcake!  Happy Experimenting!

We recently received this fun photograph from an ATC fan.

Here’s what she had to say:

Even as an adult I have a major sweet tooth and there are few things I like more than cupcakes! I love to bake and one day I will open my own bakery, where I have always envisioned having cupcakes as our main feature. One day I imagined a room like Willie Wonka where the cupcakes could grow like vines. I have been wanting this tattoo for awhile now so I just went for it! I got it done in Fayetteville, NC by Nathan at Tattoo World. Now I can’t wait to go to the beach and show it off!

Thank you for sharing!  It looks fantastic!  Have fun at the beach, and be sure to bring some cupcakes along!

A new cupcake business has launched in Chicago!  Flirty Cupcakes on Wheels takes a new spin on the idea of an ice cream truck.

Flirty Cupcakes drives around Chicago with a van full of cupcakes!  Imagine sitting in your office and hearing the cupcake truck pull up to the curb!  Flirty Cupcakes announces their location via Twitter or Facebook.  So far, so good, as cupcake fans are lining up in the streets!

Visit Flirty Cupcakes!

On Saturday, May 22nd, thousands flocked to the San Mateo Fairgrounds to help celebrate arts, crafts, engineering, and the do-it-yourself mindset.  Each spring, people come from the San Fransisco Bay area and beyond to the annual Maker Faire to see what’s new in the world of zany inventions.  More than 600 inventors and artists shared their wares this year.  Among them was Greg Solberg, maker of the completely electric, motorized “cupcake car.”

These cupcake cars (sometimes called muffin cars) were invented in 2004.  They can go as fast as 15 mph.  Each car has room for just one person, whose head sticks out the top of the cupcake.  There are currently 16 cupcake cars in existence, and they are stored in a “secret location,” in Berkeley, California.