Aileen's cupcakes

I'm way behind in getting photos of new things on here, but I'm just waiting until the powers-that-be decide to add a couple more hours in the day and then I'll do it!

Made these cupcakes last weekend for a friend's daughter's engagement party. 36 cupcakes with gumpaste flowers. Went a little crazy with the colors, but I think bright colors can be really fun, especially when on chocolate buttercream.

A couple of people recently asked me about the boxes I use -- BRP Box Shop is a fantastic resource for boxes of all shapes and sizes. You have to buy in quantities of 100, but if you've got the room and/or the business, it's totally worth it. You can also email them and they'll send you free samples. Their cupcake holders are the best - nothing's worse than a box full of smooshed cupcakes!

Love the color contrast!

All boxed up and ready to go

Fire Truck Cupcakes

Update! I'm thrilled that Cupcakes Take the Cake blogged about these cupcakes on March 27. Thanks!

I've always had a thing for firemen (they're the only guys who can really pull off a mustache), and now I have a thing for gumpaste fire trucks. My search for a MINI fire truck cookie cutter was fruitless, so I had to improvise and make my own.

Cupcakes are vanilla bean with vanilla buttercream, fire trucks are gumpaste. Couldn't decide if the ladders looked best up or down (Doug said up, I thought down) so I did some of both. Handpainted the number 4 with food coloring. If I make them again I'd probably use some silver dust to make the number pop a little more.

(btw - I love these cupcake boxes and holders. They make any cupcake look that much better)

Caleb's Darth Vader cupcakes

I'll admit right now that I'm not a big Star Wars fan, and either are my kids, so I was a little lost when a friend asked me to make cupcakes for her son Caleb's Star Wars birthday party.

Again, Flickr saved the day - a search for Darth Vader cupcakes brought up these, from the oh-so talented Kati Peck. She just started a blog, Tasty... Good... Delicious..., check it out - her work is amazing!

This was my attempt the recreate her design. Thanks, Kati!

Heads were made with a bell-shaped cutter

Light sabers in the making

I always make one bigger cupcake for the birthday kid (I'm sure there's a "Luke, I am your Faaaaather" joke here somewhere)

Big cupcake boxed and ready to go

Happy Valentine's Day!

I made these for my son's Valentine's Day party at school. Vanilla cake with vanilla buttercream. Simple and yummy. Gumpaste decorations. Striped wrappers from a recent Surfas shopping spree. I unfortunately finished them after Doug left for work, so the photography is my own.

Happy (early) Valentine's Day. Go squeeze someone you love today, tomorrow, everyday... because life is just too damn short!

Tess' cupcakes**

Big excitement - our kitchen renovation is happening soon, soon, soon - October 14 to be exact! This is the last job I'm taking until it's done, which should be right around Thanksgiving (fingers crossed, god willing, etc., etc.)

Tess' mother Brett first hired me last year to make Elmo cupcakes for Tess' 2nd birthday. (As an aside, this photo, taken with crappy light with my crappy camera, is far and beyond the most popular of all of our photos on Flickr, with 2200+ views to date. If you are a Flickr user and haven't checked out the stats section, you should - it's pretty cool.)

For her 3rd birthday, Tess wanted princess cupcakes - something similar to the cupcakes I made with leftover colored chocolate pieces from Lindsay's cake, but with crowns instead of doodads. The best thing about working with Brett is that she's not completely set on a design and gives me some freedom to make what I think would work best, so I decided to make teeny crowns out of gumpaste instead.

I tried a couple of different ways to make the crowns, using cutters, etc., but in the end came up with cutting long strips of gumpaste, notching the tops, and cutting those into little pieces. They dried overnight and I topped each crown with a dot of royal icing (normally I'd just use buttercream but I really wanted the dots to dry in place and royal's the best thing for that).

60 cupcakes in all, 1/2 chocolate, 1/2 vanilla bean, with an extra large one for the birthday girl. I just had enough batter to make 30 of each flavor and thought 1/2 a batch of my buttercream would be enough, but of course it wasn't - I was short at least 10 cupcakes. At 11pm the night before I made another 1/4 batch and finished them off. Good thing I usually have pounds and pounds of butter and powdered sugar as backup!

Big one in the middle for the birthday girl

Thinking they look a tad more like a jester hat than a princess crown, but that's ok with me!

action shot - how the crowns were made (because I know everyone was wondering:)

crowns ready to be topped with royal icing

**BTW - I actually looked this up - when using an apostrophe to indicate possession after a proper noun, either ' or 's is acceptable, but I think less is more:)