For the love of cupcakes

Who doesn't love a cupcake? They are perfectly portioned little bites of heaven. What's more, they give me an excuse to wield my pastry bag.


I dream of piping, creating flowers, making buttercream frosting, chocolate ganache.... It's becoming borderline obsessive.

Just before the holidays, I caved and bought a pastry bag kit. My "starter kit" included petal, star and round tips. Of course I had muffins in the house — carrot oatbran — so I figured why not frost them with cream cheese for a healthy after dinner treat? My first attempt:

From there, I have been looking for any excuse to bake and frost cupcakes.


One of the first batches I made were rum raisin mini cupcakes with rum glaze and rum frosting. They were so delicious, I didn't even get to take of picture of them.

Another batch that didn't receive photographic evidence were gingerbread mini cupcakes with orange-ginger frosting. I brought them to an open house party and convinced myself that eating four of them was equivelent to eating one standard-size cupcake.

For our special Hanukkah dinner I made chocolate Frambois cupcakes with raspberry frosting. They were quite lovely.

The obsession continued with a batch of lowfat orange chocolate cupcakes for dinner guests:

And then I found an excuse to use my naturally dyed red, white, and green jellybeans at Christmas-time:

Most recently, we hosted our annual holiday open house. With kids afoot, I thought brightly colored mini cupcakes would be a fun treat. Earlier in the week I had roasted beets, so I used the beet juice to create a fushia frosting. The cupcakes were devoured by kids and grown-ups alike.