pOp! ah-ha!

hello kitties! :)  i love her!

i'm SO loving summer.  this year i decided that instead of teaching summer school, i'd become a student again.  thus, i'm taking a summer writing course.  it's a three week course put on by the hawaii writing project.  it's at UH so i actually kinda feel like i'm in college again.  i'm learning to read as a writer and write as a reader.  it's nice because not only am i learning to teach writing, but i'm learning to become a better writer myself.  i also get five professional development credits.  another plus is that i'm out by 3:00, which is not super early, but definitely earlier than i leave school during the school year.

more kitties...gotta work on her ears, some of them look like
little devil ears and some look like cow horns...yikes!

this leaves me with more time to work on my baking.  this week i decided to focus on cake pops.  i've been improving.  in teacher terms, i'd say i've moved from a WB (well below, like a D or an F) to a DP (developing proficiency, like a C...maybe even a B-).  i'd like to thank my tutor YouTube :)  a wonderful resource!

my version of the birthday cake ball :)

here are some of my ah-ha moments:
- scoopers help make the cake-balls consistent in size
- dipping the sticks in chocolate helps the stick stay in
- freezing the balls before dipping help secure the stick even more
- sometimes when you take a frozen cake ball and dip it in the chocolate, it cracks

still working on:
- neatness
- smoothness
- time management

hoping for more ah-ha moments! :)  i'll share them as i discover them :) :)

wrapped to share!

cupcakes galore

chocolate sundae

this past weekend was my cousin's wedding and his fiance (now wife) asked if i'd bake for their wedding.  i was SO excited and felt SO honored.  we decided on 250 mini cupcakes and 50 regular cupcakes.  somewhere in the process, i got my numbers mixed up and got the idea that i was making 300 minis and 50 regulars, so my goal was to shoot for 350.

mixing red velvet

mini scoops

four hundred twenty-one

buttercream

loaded up

since this was my first huge baking project, i asked my cousin (not the one getting married, another one) to assist me.  we decided we'd bake on friday and frost on saturday.  our flavors of choice were red velvet w/ a vanilla buttercream and a chocolate sundae with a vanilla buttercream drizzled with a chocolate ganache.  so remember how we were shooting for 350 cupcakes?  well, i estimated that each batch would make 50 minis...turns out that each batch made 90 something minis!  this was a pleasant surprise.  we started baking at 8:30 am finished at 12:30 pm...not-so-bad.  4 hours and we ended up with 421 cupcakes (yes, i know the numbers don't match, yet again...but it's better to have extras!)

homemade royal icing flowers

red velvet

homemade chocolate ganache drizzle

minis

decorations.  my inspiration was cupcake wars.  i was shooting for elegance with a bam!  i wanted the display as a whole to be eye-catching, yet i wanted each cupcake to look nice standing on it's own.  since the wedding color was red, i made royal icing flowers with pearls in the center.  in the process, i learned that if you want a true red, you need to use a lot of food coloring.  in my first batch, i didn't use enough and ended up getting a coral color...nice, but not for this wedding.  i needed to redo it and this time i added way more coloring and even a few drops of purple.  this worked out way better.  when decorating we also added a sprinkle of silver balls to the red velvet cupcakes and chocolate curls to the chocolate sundae cupcakes.  it added spark and class!

bam!

in the end, the display was nothing short of what i wanted it to be and the wedding wasn't either.  it was a beautiful night.  congrats jenn & ryden and thank you to my cousin christy who worked with me on this project, couldn't have done it without you!