"Healthy" Cupcakes

This is the first dessert I made from Everyday Food: Great Food Fast by Martha Stewart. FI asked for carrot cupcakes. They were easy to make but a little more time-intensive because you have to grate the carrots, which I did by hand (I guess it would have been easier if I had used a food processor).

I also doubled this recipe since we were taking this as a dish to FI's family's Chinese New Year dinner and we wanted to make sure there was enough for everyone.

Here is the batter with everything mixed in. I actually didn't include walnuts because several of FI's nieces and nephews are allergic. I love the bright orangey color of the batter - it's so happy looking!


The batter poured into cups. We made a ton of cupcakes with the recipe doubled. Something like 20 regular cupcakes and 30 mini cupcakes.


Cupcakes baking in the oven. I only needed to fill the cups halfway and the rising of the batter did the rest.


Finished cupcakes cooling in our apartment!


I don't have a photo of the icing and the cupcakes iced, but the cream cheese recipe that came along with the carrot cupcake recipe was really easy. You didn't need a mixer, you could do everything by hand. You just have to let the cream cheese soften at room temperature for a little while and then pour confectioner's sugar over it and stir to blend. I didn't even use as much sugar as the recipe called for, I just poured in a little at a time and mixed until it was a creamy consistency. Then I iced the cakes.

The cupcakes were delicious! The carrots were a great texturizer, the allspice and orange juice added a real kick to the flavors, and the icing balanced the sweetness really well.

More practice of my icing skills...

I continue practicing my icing skills. This time I made cupcakes. And this time I didn't use any random organic or wheat or baking mix flour. I used basic all-purpose white flour and the cupcakes came out beautifully. Don't they look like little flowers all lined up?


This time I whipped up a batch of orange colored royal icing and went to town. I didn't bother using my patterned tip. I think the patterns only really show up if you use a stiffer icing, like buttercream or whipped. Royal icing (until dried) was too liquidy to hold any shape besides lines drawn.

I tried to think of as many fun shapes and designs as I could for each cupcake. I can say for all 28 cupcakes I came up with a different design.

Check out my homage to Charlie Brown in the middle cupcake.


Here's a bunch where I did crazy repetitive patterns. The polka dotted one in the upper right is for my friend who has a fear of dots. (It's apparently a true fear!)


The one on the left is supposed to be a soccer ball. The one on the right is supposed to coral.


The one on top is a rip-off of a Hostess cupcake. The one on the left is a baseball.


All the cupcakes decorated!


I kind of like not having so much icing on my cupcakes. I like them for the cake, not the huge dollop of icing on top, where there's so much you can't get to the cake.

Plus royal icing dries nice and hard and shiny so they looked just as cool the next day.

Practicing my drawing skills...

In the new year, I've added another baked good to my portfolio - sugar cookies. I use a recipe from Martha Stewart (recommended by FI's sister). I bought a gigantic set of cookie cutters from Bed, Bath & Beyond and some icing tips from Michael's.

The sugar cookies came out pretty well and I wanted to ice them and learn how to make beautiful designs. I used an easy royal icing recipe from the Food Network, courtesy of Alton Brown, and added food coloring to make pink and blue icing.

After making the icing, I split it into 2 batches and then added food coloring.


Then I filled an icing bag, attached the tip, and started drawing.


It was fun to think of fun designs for the cookies. I had made stars, circles, and baseball hats. For the circles, I kept trying to think of different sports balls and how they look. For the hats, I either drew the seams or tried to put logos on them. The stars I just made patterns.

Here's a batch I decorated with pink icing.


After icing cookies in just blue and pink, I started switching between both colors.


By the end of the evening, some of the cookies were pretty colorful and a little psychedelic looking.


It was pretty hard to draw straight lines and circles. Whenever I started and stopped, it made an extra blob on the cookie. The lines were pretty thick too. I bought a pretty narrow tip but still the icing was pretty bold and thick.


While I was able to do a lot of fun designs, now I know why beautifully iced cookies cost $3 or $4 each. At least the icing dried nicely and the patterns were pretty cool to look at. The cookies were good to eat too.