Sometimes I am ridiculous. I present to you Exhibit A:

Really though, my obsession with baking hits a high whenever I am invited to any get together that is even vaguely themed. This week’s party? A classy-themed shindig planned by a fellow fourth-year journalism student, Joel (for those who follow my comments, he was the one who identified the correct way to pluralize stegosaurus).

Cupcakes are my go-to “bring to a party and have everyone fawn over you and be impressed” food, but things have gotten challenging lately. The challenge: I have made a countless number of cupcake recipes already (see my cupcake category in the drop down menu on the right), meaning that creativity has been ever the more difficult to uncover. Google, which is normally a constant source of inspiration, failed me this time around. If you enter the term “classy cupcake” you stumble on more tragically named bakeries than anything else.

What I’m saying is that extensive brainstorming went into finding the perfect cupcake for this party. At first, I thought of doing something infused with champagne, before realizing that I was far too lazy to go buy a bottle and that the resulting purchase would likely just throw me into a tizzy of early morning alcoholism. I thought of dipping strawberries in chocolate, stuffing raspberries with a ganache, mixing finely chopped mint leaves into a decadent filling… None of the combinations were quite right. Nor did I have time for them.

My guardian angel of the week, Martha Stewart, saved the day. One of my searches landed me on her slideshow of fancy cupcakes. I was clicking through photo after photo, bleary eyed and getting increasingly disgusted by the hypothetical pool of drool that was being induced by the pictured cupcakes. Then, just like that, it happened. I found the perfect solution to my problem. It was slide number 18 out of 30. Candy-Bow-Tie Cupcakes. Be still my beating heart.

Everything was a breeze from here. I quickly whipped up a plain chocolate cupcake batter, and baked 20 cupcakes with perfectly rounded tops. Then the real fun began: it was bow tie making time.

Aside: Why does bow tie have a space between words, while necktie is all one word? It seems unfair to me. 

These candy bow ties were made with fruit by the foot candy, purchased at my handy dandy local corner store. I LOVED completely hated that I bought too many rolls, and my attentive bow tie, er, tying, was accompanied by the inhaling of nearly 15 feet of candy fun. We will not discuss the sugar crash that followed.

The bow tie making process is a little complicated to explain in words, and the instructions Martha (bless her soul) gives are not the easiest to follow. And so, I present my first video tutorial, made mid-sugar crash with a hairstyle that has been ruined by a morning of incessant head-in-the-oven cupcake checking. Please don’t judge. Update: Yep, there is most definitely an issue with lip-word co-ordination in this video. I blame my four-year-old laptop and the fact that it was running on reserve battery power at the time. Bear with me. Update 2: Oh god that’s a terrible screen capture.

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/35851729 w=500&h=400]
I woke up at 7 a.m. on Friday morning to make the mint buttercream icing for the cupcakes (once again, I am so grateful for the silence of my new Kitchenaid hand mixer). Freya and I have a new roommate, who has already noticed that we bake way more than the average people. She came downstairs on Friday to the sight of me making Oreo cookie crumb suits for my cupcakes. I am not helping my cause, am I?

Anyways, the result was adorable, I thought. These are definitely one of the top five favourite things that I’ve made. Suit up!

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I don’t need to tell anyone twice that peanut butter and chocolate are a masterful combination.

I’ve been experiencing a peanut butter and chocolate (hereon in to be known as PB&C) revival lately, and I completely blame these cookies of Britt’s that she made back in November.

Since I got my hand mixer for Christmas, I’ve been dying to make some sort of cake and take full advantage of its blending powers. I settled (perhaps settled is the wrong word for something that you truly adored) on these peanut butter cupcakes. We were going over to a family friend’s house for supper and I, true to form, offered to bring dessert. I figured peanut butter was a safe bet. These cupcakes also came with a not-too-sweet, semi-improvised icing that I whipped up to satisfy my chocolate craving. Believe it or not, no one in my family likes chocolate in dessert (terrible, I know), so this was pretty much as far as I could go.

As for the actually cake mixing, it was a dream. My hand mixer made the batter a fluffy, peanut butter pillow which scooped like a cotton ball into the tiny white muffin cups. The oil in the peanut butter made the original muffin cups slip off after baking, and so I iced the cupcakes and plopped them back into fresh, slightly smaller ones. We had to get dressed up for dinner, after all.

In the end, these cupcakes were delicious and, surprisingly, not too dense. A PB&C success story.

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Two things must be disclosed about me and my personality before this post begins:

1. I enjoy baking just for myself (you never would have guessed, right?), however the idea of baking for other people, specifically in potluck and/or BBQ settings really sends me over the moon.
2. I am incapable of saying no to any request that requires me to make copious amounts of baked goods.

More specifically, the first-year journalism student picnic that happened last Saturday.

When my friend Averie asked if I wanted to bring a dessert to the event, I of course immediately knew that I would be bringing cupcakes. And lots of them. Since I’m not living with five other people anymore, two of whom had consistently hungry boyfriends, it’s a little more difficult to make the mass amount of cupcakes that I used to. I could eat them all, yes, but I’m trying to do things that aren’t detrimental to my health, remember?

Deciding what flavours of cupcakes to bring involved an extensive brainstorming session, one that saw me slumped out on our IKEA futon, scribbling ideas onto a piece of loose leaf. I didn’t want to make too many flavours that I had already tried, nor did I want to be super adventurous and become even more broke than I currently am (damn you Europe).

And so, after much inner conflict and personal indecisiveness, I settled on the following four flavours:

– Psychedelic cupcakes with a cream cheese icing*;
– Pumpkin cupcakes with a brown sugar cream cheese icing*;
– Snickerdoodle cupcakes with a cinnamon brown sugar cream cheese icing; and, my personal favourite,
– Mint double chocolate chip cupcakes with a peppermint buttercream icing

*repeat offenders

Once the key flavour decisions were made, I trekked over to the Bulk Barn where I, once again, managed to spend enough to put a noticeable influx in their quarterly budget report.  Okay, it wasn’t that bad, but I did buy so much cake flour, icing sugar and white sugar that it made my black shirt look like I had major dandruff issues. I brushed myself off and headed over to the actual grocery store, buying butter, eggs and cocoa galore. All in a days work.

What came next was not all in a day’s work.

I knew I wouldn’t have time to bake everything on Friday and Saturday and, considering I had training for two different jobs on those days, I knew time would be of the essence. The only logical thing to do was to start baking on Wednesday, before school started. For each of the next four days – Wednesday through to Saturday, I baked a batch of cupcakes a day. Budgeting my time effectively, I left the always-horrible task of icing until about 1:30 p.m. on Saturday afternoon, just a short three hours before the picnic was due to start.

Brief side-tracked confession: I hate everything about icing. Besides eating it. But really. The mixing, the PILES of icing sugar, the back-breaking piping work, the solidified chocolate ganache… the list goes on. </whine>

Oh wait, one more thing. Making icing also means I’m prone to accidents like this. Poor iPhone.

In the end, the cupcakes were done and delivered in time, thanks to a noble steed (my parents and their van) who just happened to be in town for the weekend. Life savers.

For those of you who aren’t j-school nerds, the -30- on the mint chocolate chip cupcakes is how a journalist indicates that a story is done. There, now you learned something today. You’re welcome.

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