A Month's Worth of Baking In One Blog Post

Prepare yourself, because you are about to be bombarded with some baking goodness here. I apologize profusely for being so late with the pictures, blogging, recipes, etc. But it just means that you get a monster blog entry today. It involves traveling back in time to St. Patrick's Day first...enjoy!


Irish Car Bomb Cupcakes (Or the more PC version - Bailey's, Guinness and Whiskey Cupcakes)

I found the recipe for these cupcakes here on Smitten Kitchen's website. Seriously adorable site with a seriously adorable name.


This has got to be the best icing I have ever tasted. So delicious, not to mention that every time anyone opened up the container to grab a cupcake, the smell of sugary goodness and Bailey's filled the air. That is a winning combination.

I used a Wilton 1M tip to decorate these. It's my new favorite tip and I've started using it on all my cupcakes. It makes it look fancy with hardly any work at all, you can't beat that! I am drooling over these cupcakes and currently trying to find a reason to make them again (sans whiskey this time, I can't stand the smell).

Ok, so those went over really well at the office. They were like little bites of heaven, or what I imagine heaven would taste like in the form of an alcoholic cupcake. The next baking project was something I did for my mom. The kids in Sunday School at my church back home in Jacksonville do a bake sale every year to raise money for their Unicef Project. It's a great cause and this year they wanted to purchase a cow which means they needed to raise $500. I decided to help out with my baking prowess (ha, I have always wanted to use that word). Here was the result...

Chicks For a Cause

This idea came straight from the gifted baking brain of Bakerella. I absolutely love these little guys. I think it's because they're so round and tubby, something about them just oozes cuteness. It's almost sickening how cute they are. I had the help of a lovely assistant, my baby sister Betsy. Who also made her first ever loaf of bread that weekend, we'll show it off really quick:

The chicks are actually super easy to make and Bakerella does a great job of explaining it. I'm more about pictures and end results here. One of my favorite parts is the packaging. I just bought tiny treat bags and threw them over the tops of the chicks, used raffia in different colors to tie them shut and created cute little cupcake tags for all of them.


I also made cupcakes (from scratch!) with my favorite recipe. It's called Plain Jane Lets Loose...but you can only call it that if you use alcohol in the recipe and, considering this was a church function, I decided to skip the liquor. So these are just Plain Jane cupcakes, but then I added some fabulous pink icing and sparkling sugar inspired by the Fancy Nancy books. Yes, I know these books are for little girls, but the illustrations are gorgeous and there are sparkles everywhere and she uses fun words like dapper and ooh la la! And Xenophile. I mean, really, these books are amazing.


Plain Jane Meets Fancy Nancy Cupcakes

I know what you're thinking...ooh la la!

I used the Wilton 1M tip again and actually just used vanilla store bought icing. I dyed it pink with some fuschia food coloring and the awesome sparkles and cupcake liners were purchased from one of the best websites ever: bakeitpretty.com I could drop some serious cash at their online store. One more picture and then I'm done. Sorry, I think that posting pink sparkly pictures is just about the best thing ever.


Au revoir cupcakes!

A little break from desserts...the day after I made all of these goodies I headed to Florida for a nice mini holiday with my pops. We spent some time in Jupiter watching a few spring training games, checking out the beach and eating food. Then we went to Disney for a day and enjoyed some rain...and more food of course.

This is when I force you to look at vacation pictures!

The beach!
Baseball!
Brie!
Erika!

Ok, I'm done. I had to include Brie and Erika because it had been over two years since I'd seen them last. That's forever. I was so excited that I got to spend some time with both of them, it made my trip. :)

Ok...this post is getting ridiculously long. I'm making it a "To be continued..." blog post. Don't worry though, it will be continued later on today. After I've enjoyed some lunch and wine with Miss Angela Rickard.

So...to be continued!