A Cupcake Extravaganza

Well, Valentine's Day came and went, and so did our cupcakes.

I was supposed to help out with Christian's class Valentine's Day party, and I volunteered to make cupcakes for the class. It was going to be simple. Cupcakes, frosting, and a couple of M&M's on the top of each one (the pink and red ones in the Valentine's bag). My plan was to make some yellow cake ones and some chocolate cake ones...there is at least one kid in his class that doesn't like chocolate and I didn't want her not to have a treat. But if I'm making cupcakes, I'm making chocolate ones, because who's going to go to all that trouble for yellow cake? And then eat it?

Not I, that's who.

I was trying to be organized and efficient.

That should have been my first clue that things would probably not go according to plan.

I started with the frosting, since that didn't require eggs, and I could just quickly rinse out my KitchenAid bowl and get to work on the cupcakes. That went very smoothly! I set my frosting aside (buttercream...mmm, you just can't go wrong there) and began the cupcakes.

Yellow cake first. Now. I have two cupcake watchamacallits. I was going to say tins. But they're not actually tin. One is metal and the other is stoneware. I was trying to be efficient, so I thought I could make 24 cupcakes at a time.

Michaela checked on them and noticed one set was puffing up faster. I was nervous about this, but I figured that I could just take the one set out early if I needed to. And after this initial scare, they turned out fine. I thought.

Then it was on to the chocolate cupcakes. I used the Pioneer Woman's sheet cake recipe; it's one of those no-fail cake recipes, and she had an adapted-for-cupcakes version on her site.

This was after the yellow cupcakes. Oh dear. Clean-up was super fun later that night. Especially after I grilled steaks too.

When I turned the first cakes out, I noticed that they left a lot of grease behind. This worried me. Were they going to be too oily?

Then, once I had my chocolate cakes done, we discovered they didn't come out of the wrappers easily. At all! They just crumbled and stuck to the sides. I told the girls we would just keep the chocolate ones here and take all yellow (too bad for us, huh?). Even if we were digging out the cake with spoons, we'd eat them. I'm not wasting good chocolate cake.

We got the yellow cake cupcakes frosted, and stuck an extra liner on each one to hide the too-much-butter bottoms (that's not a phrase I ever foresaw myself using) (although I know another bottom that the very same phrase could apply to), and with the M&Ms on top they were as cute as could be. (Sorry, that's a pre-M&M picture.)

In the end, the class cupcakes were good enough to eat (I know because there were no empty plates in the room)...frosting covers a multitude of flavorlessness. And apparently, if your cupcakes are leaking butter out of the bottom, then it's a great idea to smear powdered-sugared butter on the top. Balance! And the chocolate cupcakes settled down in their wrappers later. We managed to get the liners off with little trouble or cupcake loss. A few of them were burned, but I just cut the bottoms off and frosted them. (Frosting! Covers problems!)

I made enough cupcakes for Cox's Army. This was my initial thought. But it turns out that we can tear through some cupcakes around here. Especially when we even eat them for breakfast. I'm thinking I need to make more, since we have more liners (Mom and Dad sent some cute Valentine's Day ones). I cannot let those go to waste. Right?!