Baby Shower- Keepin' It Clean!

Kids of all ages LOVE the cupcakes.

Here's Io giving us a 1000 words of cupcake love in that high wattage smile...

This week I have heard some notable stories of people with similar goals to mine: hipsters drinking their way through the alphabet ("What's Z?" Mister Filmschool asks, "Zythromyacin?"); and a friend of friend cooking her way through a vegan cupcake cookbook. It's good to have goals!

;-)

And good friends who can handily come up with at least three drinks beginning with Z- Zima, Zombies, Zelda Fitzgeralds... alright you guys, what about X?


We had a great time at our agave sweetened- gluten free flourless chocolate cake cupcake social last week- we tap danced and sang fun songs on my pink acoustic guitar and watched extreme pet wrestling- good times.I found a whole lotta ingredients at Safeway- I was a little bummed because I kind of like zipping around in the Prius going to every sweets store in town. The Nabisco Famous Chocolate Wafers are ostensibly hard to find- but there they were at Safeway!

Lucky for me I did have a sous-chef this week- not as good as an eleven year old girl but still with an enthusiasm for candy- Mister Filmschool helped me cut up the starburst fruit chews for the baby bibs. He said he'd never thought he'd be cutting up Starbursts to make baby bibs...

The baby cupcakes were pretty labor intensive- much like real babies! The book had you make some different skin colors- but I made all of them a creepy flesh-tone= mine. And they wanted you to give some of them bottles and some pacifiers and some bibs- but of course ours all had to have everything...since I bought a lot of pacifiers from "The Candy Store" and what else am I gonna use them for? The alphabet drinks?

This was my first experience with using the modeling chocolate and the template in the book. Worked out pretty well to make the safety pins. I have two extra to re-use for the Special Dolores Park cupcakes for next week!

Here is the cd I made expressly for friends' baby showers- It's on I-tunes:

"I Wish You Well"

We wish Heather a very very happy baby shower and all the best with the new baby girl!

Valentine Candy Cupcakes- April Fool!

It's my birthday- shake yer funky umpie!

It's that time of year -Spring- the flowers are blooming- the parka goes downstairs-I have to kill the flies that come in the open windows while the animals lie around and eat bon bons and watch Nip/Tuck reruns- and--- I have to put on shorts to take the dog to the beach! They're gonna start calling me "cupcake stumps", really.

So I began experimenting with the Agave Sweetened Flourless Chocolate Cake recipe for these cupcakes. Agave- nectar from the same cactus that brings us Tequila - so it's still good- has a lower glycemic index and is more of an espresso buzz for me than the true crack of the sugar high. Right out of the oven, the cake tasted better than the Whole Foods version- but I do think we'll have to serve it warm and with tons of fruit juice sweetened soy ice cream to cut it. It's basically chocolate and butter and sweetener.

I couldn't get the dark chocolate frosting in the microwave dipping technique to work with the agave sweetened frosting- too runny. Maybe more butter and some real sugar!

I was reading Julie Powell's blog- The Julie/Julia Project, and I must say I like her more in the blogsphere than in the movie. She swears! She was hunting for marrow bones in New York City in the winter, so I had to give her that as I tried to track down a Valentine's Candy box in San Francisco on a 70 degree Saint Patrick's Day. Seven stores later we found one at Shaw's on West Portal! Walgreen's has a whole lotta candy and I don't think I am going to find anything I need this whole year of cupcakes at Whole Foods. I did try Rainbow grocery and they did have powdered soy milk! Mmmmmm, nice cupcakes!

Abbondanza!

Spaghetti Cupcakes for Paul's Birthday

Mmmm- not getting cat hair on the cupcakes or licking them tastes gooooood!

These cupcakes were pretty easy- the hardest part was looking for the Chianti bottle for a prop and picking the best picture!

It was fun to squirt the pasta all over the cupcakes and sing a little song I probably learned from Sesame Street- "La- la -la -la -la la."

The book said to put in half a teaspoon of cocoa powder to the frosting and four drops of yellow food coloring. I think this made it way too "greige", the color for 2010 according to Joan Rivers. I ended up putting in about ten drops of yellow and some more frosting.

39 more recipes to go in 340 days!

Events coming up are going to require quite a bit of searching for the special candy ingedients and recipes for things like vegan cupcakes- so I will be busy running all over town trying to find candy stores that let Buster come in and shop with me! We like Z Cioccolato on Columbus. I also found some pastel marshmallows, after dreaming about them (you don't wanna know), at Safeway, but they are in the shape of bunnnies. I'll just have to cut them up with clean, sharp scissors.

We discovered that Buster is probably Bichon and Poodle- a bichonoodle! Now we can go to poodle mix meet-ups!

Abbondanza is Italian for Bon Appetit (more or less).

Kiss an Italian today! Hey, nice cupcakes!

Popcorn Cupcakes In Honor of Oscar

This week we made the popcorn box cupcakes in honor of Oscar! Also, they looked easy and the book said one could buy the popcorn boxes at the party store- it used to be any excuse to party and now it's any excuse to go to the party store! The party store had the popcorn boxes but did not have any yellow marshmallows. The hunt for yellow marshmallows led us to Safeway and Walgreen's, before we had to turn to Google and Yelp. We found some yellow marshmallow "products" at a store called "The Candy Store", something tells me we'll be back! The popcorn was easy to make but was very time consuming.

I made these sundae cupcakes myself- out of my own imagination and not the book- in honor of the movie "Up", which was our favorite because of the talking dog, and because it mentioned Fenton's, an 114 year old ice cream parlor that my father used to take me to and his parents used to take him to.
Buster and Louie spent a great deal of time making their Oscar picks, but couldn't cut and paste them from Word. You'll have to take my word for it that they had an uncanny sense and guessed all the movies correctly, especially if "Up" was the winner.

Here's Louie getting in on the "Action!"

Hey, nice cupcakes! We're off to tap dancing lessons!

Buster dragged me off in the Prius to the beach so we could ruminate about how much we hate Ben Stiller. It was Mr. Bigglesworth's 2nd birthday, and all the doodles and labradoodles and goldendoodles and bichonoodles were running around grinning from ear to ear. Ah, joy!

Who could concentrate on how much they hate Ben Stiller at the beach?

And, there's not a whole lot to do with cupcakes at the beach, except there is a giant all-white Bulldog that Buster always tries to dig holes with named Cupcake.

Last night we had Trixie, a ten year old tiny miniature poodle, and her mom come over to watch "A Serious Man" with us. Trixie stole Buster's hoof and growled at him for trying to get it back. WAAA-AY more entertaining than "A Serious Man". Poor Larry Gopnick. Have you ever noticed how many synonyms for "tool" there are in Yiddish? Schmuck, Putz, Yutz, Shmendrick. We like to say things in Yiddish because it's fun and it reminds us of Nana who used to say things like "umpie".

We thought of a catchphrase: "Hey, nice cupcakes!" It doesn't even have any remotely dirty connotations.