Forget the $45 cupcake from Australia. There’s a far more expensive cupcake available in the United States. Appropriately, the decadent $750 cupcake can only be found in Sin City.  Sweet Surrender at The Palazzo in Las Vegas, which requires 48 hours to prepare the expensive treat, find this extravagant cupcake satisfies big spenders’ sweet teeth. For most of us, the only way we could justify spending that much on a single treat would be if Lady Luck were generous enough to smile upon us.

Read the rest of this entry »

Have you been looking for a reason to visit Queensland, Australia? Well, if you are going to be around and don’t mind spending $45 on a cupcake, you might want to consider adding a visit to Crave Cupcakes in Toowoomba to your itinerary. There you can place an order for one of the very limited edition two-dozen Golden Cupcakes that they will be baking. Of course, you only have until August 14^th to place the order and they must be picked up on August 17^th. But why would anyone want to spend $45 on a cupcake? Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes you just want a cupcake. But, only one cupcake. And not everyone has a bakery close at hand where you can run in quickly to purchase the single cupcake you are craving. So, do you go without the cupcake you long for or do you waste time and energy baking more cupcakes than you really want or need? Japanese company, Daiso, has come up with a solution that means you do not have to settle for either of those options. They believe you can microwave your cupcake, and eat it too.

Read the rest of this entry »

I know that Easter is a few months away but, I can’t help but share this great cupcake tutorial/recipe with you.

Crazy, creative bakers our there are always coming up with new amazing techniques for baking cupcakes and this one takes the (cup)cake!

Simply, Amazing!

Easter Cupcakes Baked in Real Egg Shells from Cupcake Project 

Owls seem to be all the rage lately! Why wouldn’t they be with all the cute owl things I see around – checks, wallets, earrings, etc. You want it (with owls), you got it!

If you want Owl Cupcakes, we got those too. These are so stinking adorable!

Reeses Owl Cupcakes from Inside BruCrew Life

I am all about getting my craft on this winter! I am finding so many good DIY ideas and tutorials, that my bookmark folder runneth over! To stop my my folder from busting at the seams, I have decided to share some of my ideas with you. But of course, they have a cupcake twist!

DIY with Foil Baking Cups from HeyLook

Garland

Backdrop

Gifts

So my theme word of the year is “sparkly,” and what better place to start than with sparkly cupcakes!

There are cupcakeries named “Sparkle Cupcake Company.”

There are cupcake products with “sparkle.”

And then there is “Sparkle and Hay” with step by photo step illustrations of how to make these beautiful, sparkly cupcakes.  Their website and Facebook are all about rustic country chic weddings, so kick up your heels and get into your kitchen, turn on a little Sugarland, and start the new year off with sparkle!

I think we can all agree that there is no better way to spend New Years Day than eating and baking cupcakes! If you agree with me,  than I have found a great recipe for you to try from the blog La Mia Vita Dolce.

Hot Fudge Sundae Cupcakes

These look so fabulous and they are visualually stunning!

Thinking of what to put together for your New Year’s Eve party?

Why not cook up your brew instead of drinking it?  Here’s a recipe for Guinness and Bailey Irish Cupcakes that strikes me as rather top-o-the-morning.

Take it one step further, and here’s a recipe for Chocolate Guinness and Whiskey Cupcakes with Bailey’s Frosting.  I’d put this into the later-in-the-day category.

And this recipe variation includes a bittersweet ganache with whiskey option within the Guinness Cupcake.

Cheers!

Merry Christmas Everyone! I woke up this morning to see it spitting snow outside and all I could say was, “Yay!”. I am not a huge fan of snow, but, I always like to have some on Christmas, it really make it feels like Christmas when it snows and there is snow on the ground.

In honor of the spitting snow in New Hampshire, where I grew up and am spending Christmas with my parents, brother and lovely dog, I have found these amazing snowflake cupcakes. The fact that they are pink makes it a million times better.

Pink Snowflake Cupcakes from Glorious Treats

Just in the nick of time, Magnolia Bakery now offers a monthly cupcake club with nationwide shipping.  Pre-orders are being taken and shipping begins on January 2 with caramel cupcakes, followed by a different cupcake each month.

So if you find yourself in a line that’s too long for someone who is too hard to please, how about putting at least yourself in the spirit?  And while you’re placing your order, why not order Magnolia Bakery’s “Truffled Chocolate Cupcake.”

I know what I’m going to click on as soon as I click on “publish!”

Hot off the press!  Apparently, gel cupcake frosting qualified as a potential security threat at the Las Vegas Airport, causing the TSA to confiscate a cupcake!

The cupcakerie is Wicked Good Cupcakes and just looking at their website has me wanting to fly to their shop to get samples.  The ‘wicked good’ cupcakes made for the MSPCA are pictured here.  If the TSA dogs had discovered these puppies, I might understand what took place.

But my conclusion will simply be this:  it’s just another part of this year’s great cupcake recipe operation…

Happy Thursday cupcake fans! StayHomeCupcake here and I am in love with this ring I just found on Etsy today. I know it may be a bit late to put this on my Christmas list but maybe I could get a head start on my Valentine’s wish list. So, will someone please pass this hint onto my hubby? It’s only $45 and Too Original has several different styles. Love, love, love!

Good Morning ATC Community! and welcome to the official start of crunch time.  These are the days that we second-guess whether we did enough of everything and end up doing too much!

If you’re like me, you’ve baked a fair amount of holiday treasures.

But holiday week is a bit like a marathon and, in the home stretch, who isn’t looking for fresh ideas to keep inspired?  The challenge I set to myself is whether I can come up with a week of images, recipes, and instructions to keep us all – myself included – at 350F from now through next Saturday.

These Baked Ideas images are cookies, but so fresh and original they will inspire your cupcake decorating ideas. Here’s a smorgasbord of cookie decorating ideas from “Baked Ideas” by Patti Paige, along with the Baked Ideas’ Facebook page  and the video on the Baked Ideas mini gingerbread houses.  3,000 each season!

If you’re still looking for last minute gifts, Baked Ideas even sells yoga cookie cutters.  How did she do that?  Here’s her video on piping royal icing onto each one of the yoga posed gingerbread men and here’s the Baked Ideas gingerbread recipe.

Ah-ha!  My Muse gripped that one!

Today, I’m going to springboard those Baked Ideas into spice cupcakes with yoga shapes drawn on the top, including some Sandskrit symbols, such as “Namaste.”  And I know just who is on my list for these yoga cupcakes…

Now that’s what I mean about taking inspiration and giving yourself permission to be creative at the holidays!  What’s your idea?

Countdown:  6 days.

Christmas stollen is such a favorite food at the holidays, who can resist the notion of converting it into a cupcake?

Here’s one recipe for Christmas stollen cupakes from The Cupcake Project.

Raisins, dried cranberries, dried currents, dried cherries…we’ll let that negate the bit of pleasure we’ll take from a bit of cherry liqueur and brandy.  And, of course, we’ll only pour those into the recipe, won’t we?

Just in case you have some cherry liqueur left over, here’s a companion recipe for Black Forest Cupcakes.  Well, if I’m on that theme, let’s be sure to have on hand a recipe for White Chocolate Cherry Cupcakes.

Now there’s a cupcake trio that deserves a Ho-Ho-Ho!

Glitter, glitter, and more glitter!  I just want these holidays to shine so that I can sing “Silver & Gold” along with Burl Ives when spinning the Rudolph soundtrack.

What’s more perfect to go with those silver and gold ornaments than cupcakes decorated as ornaments?

These ornament cupcakes come from Hoosier country, Indiana!  “Hoosier Homemade” had several holiday cupcake decorating ideas from a multi-week cupcake challenge.

Find other inspiration in actual vintage Christmas ornaments.  The 1950s ornaments were the very essence of elegance in design and can still be found at antique co-ops and flea markets and also on etsy and e-bay.

Mmmm.  Here’s the cupcake for you to share with Santa by the fireplace:  mulled wine cupcakes.

Not familiar with “mulled wine?”  It’s wine, simmered with ingredients like cinnamon, allspice and cloves until the air smells as warm and inviting as the holidays.  Don’t be timid about experimenting with your wines or your spices.  Then trust your nose.  (Although sampling might be half the fun of being the chef for this one!)

I’m going to put this under “cupcake,” even though I’m generally a purist and a round ball wouldn’t qualify as a cupcake.

But ’tis the season, I’m on a quest for the most beautiful of holiday cupcakes, and these cupcakes were created by Cupcake Envy, a bakery of “sculpted cakelets” by owner Amy Eilert.  Cupcake Envy’s Facebook photos sport so many great shots, you’ll have no shortage of inspiration.

You may also want to notice that Cupcake Envy sells “how-to” videos.  Not a bad idea, if you think that you’ve been nice!

Let’s face it.  We start strong.  We mean well.  But in a few days, we’ll be thinking, “Smile!” as we count the remaining hours.

I’ve found the perfect inoculation to the upcoming holiday stress:  cupcakes with bling!

Have you seen a more sparkly cupcake?  These darlings were created at The Voluptuous Cup Cake Company, down under in Perth, Australia.  Just clicking on this blog spot of her cupcakes is enough to cheer a girl’s heart.

What’s your most sparkly, glittery, magical cupcake topping for the holidays?

This is it.  Your chance to enter Ghirardelli fame and Facebook feature.

Recipe for your success:

1 – “Like” the Ghirardelli page on Facebook.

2 – Fill in your basic information, upload your recipe, and upload your mouth-watering photograph.

3 – Win!

Perhaps we could do a group ATC entry?

I’d like to know of anyone’s opinion on baking with Ghirardelli and whether you find the chocolate richer, softer, and needing more cocoa powder to balance for spreading and shaping?  What about the Ghirardelli Intense Dark?  And the Ghirardelli white that I nibbled at while baking with it last week – do you do that too?  Are we shorting our batches or should we just write them as 10 oz broken into small bits with remaining 2 oz for the cook!

What do you get when you take a steak house owner and put him in a cupcakerie?

Answer:  Coke + Ruffles cupcakes!

Now I know that everyone is thinking holiday cupcakes and presents, but, after all, Santa Claus is a man, so perhaps our stockings would become a bit more plump if we left guy-inspired cupcakes beside the fireplace on Christmas Eve?

4 Rivers Sweetshop owner John Rivers has come up with several of these “sweet and savory” cupcake ideas, including Moutain Dew + Doritos cupcakes.  Rivers told The Today Show that he’s working on Nehi grape soda cupcakes, and that the secret to using sodas in frosting is to boil it down to syrup thickness.

Now that’s one Ho-Ho tip I’m headed into the kitchen to try!

What is it about Thanksgiving that invariably leads to pleas from turkeys for clemency?  Do we see similar images from cows at Fourth of July?  Fish and shrimp at New Year’s Eve?

Perhaps the answer is that we draw the turkey as children, tracing our hands with crayons, turning our thumb into the smiling turkey face, our fingers into the colorful feathers.  Seemingly every child is connected to turkeys, while all other animals are, well, options.

In an hour-long scan of turkey cupcakes, ranging from cupcakes made from ground turkey to cupcakes celebrating turkeys, this is the one turkey who captured my heart and made me think twice about the bird in my refrigerator.  If I had seen this handsome Tom earlier this week, perhaps I would have served up imitation cupcakes, under silvery domes, to be lifted to the surprise of my guests.

(Maybe next year.)

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

So I’m interested to know what you would do.

Here’s a story from England’s Daily Mail – “Cupcake Calamity” – about cupcake bakery owner Rachel Brown of Need-A-Cake, who offered a Groupon and had to bake an “astonishing” 102,000 cupcakes in response.

Apparently, Brown offered a dozen cupcakes for £6.50, instead of the usual £26, resulting in 8,500 orders…at which point Brown cut off the orders.

What’s your perspective – any sympathies?  A baker offering 75% off?  Groupon saying their offers are for an unlimited number of orders?  The angry customers, complaining that their orders were taking longer than they expected?

Are cupcakes a fad? Duncan Bloor recently posted some illuminating visuals on his Search Insights blog that show the cupcake trend sweeping the globe.  The deep blue represents strong cupcake interest, see how the deep blue is spreading across nations.

As Mark Twain has declared when confronted with news of his own death in newspapers, “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”   By the looks of it, the cupcake trend continues to strengthen.

More visuals and data on the cupcake trend at the David’s Search Insights blog.

Since watermelon the fruit is such a fun, messy, summer treat, what opportunities doe we have to use watermelon fruit in a cupcake?

From an Indiana kitchen came a watermelon cupcake recipe with instructions for making your own wrappers on a silhouette machine.  The recipe uses watermelon gelatin – very neat.

Getting warmer, I found a recipe for watermelon cupcake frosting that offers a substitution of watermelon juice for milk.

Still on my quest, I landed on What About Watermelon?, where I found a cake recipe with 1-1/3 C of watermelon, using watermelon juice in the frosting.  All the fun of the fruit and no napkins required!