Okay! NOW You Can Look on my Works, Ye Mighty. Then Despair.

I had meant to post these pictures in the last blog, but in combination with the baby waking up and the fact that my mouse was choosing not to swing to the right I just got frustrated and hit "post". So here you go. The baby is sleeping and I'm waiting for my chocolate-espresso agave mini-cupcakes to cool so that I can then apply the ganache. It's my Dad's birthday! (I just thought that I'd add that in there. He may or may not read this blog.)

This is a close-up of the cookies and cream cupcake from last post.

These are just plain white cupcakes with vanilla buttercream frosting, tinted pink. I only made these because I was having one of those moments where I was starting to feel smothered by the fact that I have three male children, one male partner, and a male Dupree living in our garage. There was too much maleness around and I needed to look at something frilly and pink. Henceforth, the pink cupcakes, which the males had no trouble wolfing down unceremoniously. They didn't even care what colour they were, or that I had been doing crazy things with the piping bag.

Now this was an experiment. I made some vegan chocolate cupcakes, cut the tops off of them in a circular shape, then I filled them with a homemade raspberry jam-like substance and vanilla buttercream icing. Then I replaced the tops I'd removed, piped on some more vanilla buttercream and drizzled over a bittersweet chocolate ganache. They were good (of course), but very messy. You wouldn't be able to eat one while driving to work, for instance. Neat freaks might need a plate and a spoon. Or fork. I prefer a fork but some people are just spoon people.

I actually put the cupcake right on the book to take the picture because the table had kid fingerprints all over it.

These next ones are mini-cupcakes that I made for Liam's party to celebrate the end of school. I had a vision of chocolate cake topped with swirls of lavender coloured vanilla buttercream with a simple dragée on the top of each one, but the boy had other ideas. So we just put either chocolate or vanilla icing on them and he dumped a bunch of assorted and brightly coloured sprinkles on them. Also, we used black papers with big, white eyeballs on them. Boys!

Speaking of boys... Liam wanted me to make my own birthday cake this year and I didn't really need anyone to twist my arm. I used the recipe from Nigella Lawson's "Nigella Bites", and I agree with her that it's the kind of cake that you'd want to eat entirely on your own after a bad break-up. You can see what I mean about boys and their idea of decorations. Liam asked if he could decorate it in private and then surprise me with the results. I was very surprised.

Now. As I was saying, "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" Also, admire how much my mad html skillz have improved ever so slightly.