Pumpkin Cupcakes and Chocolate White chocolate-chip brownies!

Considering the approach of Thanksgiving in the coming weeks, I thought it would be appropriate if I baked Pumpkin Cupcakes! I found the recipe from a book in Borders and I copied it down incase anyone might want it. It goes as follows:

Ingredients:
2 boxes Betty Crocker Yellow Cake Mix
(Water, oil and eggs that follow along with the recipe)
2 Cups Pumpkin
3 Teaspoons Pumpkin Pie Spice

Directions: Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Mix the ingredient in a bowl and mix well. Pour the mixture into each cupcake pan about 2/3 full, then pop into the oven for 18-20 minutes or until you see fit. When you bring them out of the oven, let them cool for at least 10 minutes until you frost, then design how ever you'd like!

This recipe makes about 4 dozen cupcakes, and its extremely easy to follow. I strongly suggest using cupcakes liners because it avoids any mess and it guarantees that the cupcakes won't stick to the pan (which has happened to me before and trust me, it is not good). Also, I suggest using an electric mixer considering the fact that it cuts the work time in half and it makes the batter almost perfect.Here are some pictures so you can follow along...







ALSO, I made some chocolate white chocolate brownies. If you've ever been to Diddy Reese in westwood and you've tried the chocolate white chocolate chip cookies, you know how good they are, so I decided to try them out in brownie form.

Sadly, my brownies came no where close to the cookies at Diddy Reese. They weren't as great as I thought they would be, but they were pretty good. Here are some pics:






Hope you guys like everything you see! Thanks for reading!

Sincerely,

The Blissful Baker

Ladybug Cupcakes!

This past Friday when I was deciding what food to make for PATH, I tapped into my creative side a bit more than usual...

Instead of making plain red velvet cupcakes, I decided to add a creative twist and design them as ladybugs! I was looking on the internet for some fun designs of cupcakes when I stumbled upon a ladybug design and I thought it was adorable! The design others did was with plain, vanilla frosting that was colored with dye, but I used cream cheese frosting, some chocolate frosting for design, and red sprinkles.

Here are some pictures for you to feast your eyes on ;)

Baking the cupcakes was pretty simple, but designing them took much longer. After I added the cream cheese frosting, I had to make the whole top of the cupcake red for the ladybug design, so I put the red crystallized sprinkles in a bowl, then turned the cupcake upside down and dipped the top in the bowl of sprinkles. That way, the entire top was red and sparkley! To make the black polka dot design and outline the ladybug, I used chocolate frosting. I was a bit worried about putting the chocolate flavor from frosting into the mix, but since red velvet is a type of chocolate I figured it would be okay. I finished designing the cupcakes and playing around, and finally, I took a bite! Luckily, the cupcakes didn't taste weird at all even though I added the chocolate frosting -- if anything, they tasted better!
I'm so happy I experimented and had fun designing the cupcakes this week. I really enjoyed playing around with the cupcakes and having them as my "blank canvas" to paint on. The great thing about baking is that no matter what one bakes, they can design, frost, color, and shape the cake whichever way he/she wants and it will still taste great!

Some ideas I thought of for other fun cupcakes are:
- smiley face cupcakes :)
- bowtie cupcakes
-rainbow cupcakes (the spider web effect with the colors of the rainbows on each concentric circle)
- smores cupcakes

Those are just some ideas I thought would be really fun to make sometime in the near future. I just found this old cookbook I bought a couple years ago called "Cupcakes!" and it's full of fun and interesting ideas for cupcakes that I'll definitely put to use soon.

Message me if you have any idea of cool cupcakes that you'd like to see me bake!
Thanks so much for reading and have a great week!

Sincerely,
The Blissful Baker

Halloween Goodie Bags!

So Halloween last week for I wanted to do something a bit special :)

Halloween is all about dressing up, having fun, and eating LOTS of candy... so for everyone at PATH I decided to make "spooky Halloween brownies" and put them in goodie bags! Each goodie bag had about 3 lollipops, 3 Starbursts, and one brownie. It was a little more expensive than usual for all of the candies, the brownie mix, and the designed plastic bags, but it was definitely worth it. The whole process of baking a dessert and packing it in a gift bag was really similar to my Purim Hamentaschen and Mishloach Manot project (http://theblissfulbaker.blogspot.com/2010/03/hamntaschen-and-mishloach-manot.html) from a couple months ago. I had a lot of fun planning it and setting everything up so I'm definitely going to be doing more gift bags in the future. Also, Tammy looked so happy when I showed them to her and I think she really loved them! I asked her if they were doing anything special for Halloween but she said they weren't doing anything, so I'm really glad I got to bring a little bit of fun into their day. I hope she and everyone else at PATH enjoyed them. Here are some pictures of the whole process.








Luckily, this week the actual baking process went by very smoothly! I bought a huge bag of brownie mix to use from Smart and Final and for $8 it was totally worth it -- I only had a little bit of trouble when I was cutting the brownies. When I cut the brownies with a knife, some of the brownie would stick to the knife then crumble and break off so it was a bit hard to keep clean, but I avoided any mess by using a pizza cutter and slicing through the brownies cleanly. Overall, I had a lot of fun and I think everyone at PATH really enjoyed their gift bags :)

Anyways, thanks so much for reading and following along. I hope everyone had a great Halloween full of laughs and big bags of candy! Until next time -- stay blissful!

Sincerely,

The Blissful Baker