Birthday Cupcakes!

 

I made cupcakes! These are for a friend of mine-- her birthday is today! We have a city league kickball game today and I'm bringing these to the game. I found these super cute sports-themed cupcake liners at the store and thought they'd be perfect for bring goodies to a game and now that a birthday has come up, it's perfect timing.

I made chocolate and vanilla cupcakes with vanilla buttercream and brown sugar buttercream. The ones with sprinkles have a chocolate truffle center.

I made everything a day in advance and then just assembled today. I would definitely recommend making at least the vanilla cupcakes in advance-- they tasted funny at first but taste great the next day!

Recipes:

Vanilla cupcakes I got from here.

This recipe made 14 cupcakes, which took about 17 minutes to bake at 350 F.

For the chocolate cupcakes I used the recipe from my rose cake here.

This made 10 cupcakes which baked for 15 minutes at 350 F.

The truffle center was my own recipe as follows:

Ingredients:

4 ounces baker's unsweetened chocolate

3/4 cup semisweet chocolate chips

3 tablespoons corn syrup

2 tablespoons margarine

1/2 cup soymilk

1/4 cup powdered sugar

Directions:

Chop the chocolate and add to a bowl with syrup and margarine. Heat soymilk and pour over chocolate. Stir for about a minute until chocolate is dissolved then add powdered sugar. Refrigerate until completely chilled. This will make way more than you need for 1/2 the cupcakes (maybe not too much more if you do all of them) but more truffle filling is never bad, right? Just roll into balls and roll in cocoa powder and you have homemade chocolates!

For the brown sugar buttercream I used the recipe from here. I added about 3/4 tsp molasses because it wasn't brown-sugar-y enough for my tastes and I think it turned out great!

And for the vanilla buttercream I just used a hand mixer to mix together 1/4 cup shortening with 1/4 cup margarine and beat in about 1 lb powdered sugar and 2 tablespoons of water. You can also add vanilla extract or bean, but I was out of both-- so I guess mine's just kind of neutral buttercream, not vanilla after all.

Assembly:

I used 20 of the 24 cupcakes because that's all that would fit into my cake carrier. I cut a cone-shaped piece out of half of the cupcakes (5 chocolate and 5 vanilla) and molded some of the truffle ganache into a cone to push into each one.

Then I frosted half of those with brown sugar frosting (the star-tip swirly ones) and the other half with vanilla (the smoother ones). I added coarse sugar sprinkles to the ones with truffle centers so you could tell them apart. Then I frosted the rest. So since I mixed it up so much you can have a chocolate cupcake with vanilla frosting, or a vanilla cupcake with a truffle center and brown sugar frosting, or a chocolate cupcake with brown sugar frosting.... or so on.... so many possibilities!