WordPress.com put together a little stats compilation for my blog that I thought I’d share with you. I’m sure I’m the only one interested in any of this but since they offered a way to share it with you too, I figured, why not? See you in 2012!
Here’s an excerpt:
A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 6,300 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 5 trips to carry that many people.
Click here to see the complete report.
Isn't the little decorative cupcake box I got for Christmas cute?
So as this is the time for resolutions, I think it’s a good day to set some goals for myself concerning my baking and this blog. I want to thank you for continuing to read my blog too. I started this blog back in March of this year not really expecting it to be more than just a blog to share my cupcakes with friends, but it has grown to be more than that. I want it to keep growing and hope that you’ll stick around for the ride.
So here are the goals I’m setting for myself:
What are some of your resolutions for 2012? I know it’s cliché these days to make resolutions anymore, but it’s never a bad idea to set goals for yourself. And setting them at the beginning of a year just feels like you can push the Reset button and start over.
By the way, my good friend Amber will be a guest blogger on here soon. The post that she’s preparing could be the only one she posts but hopefully she’ll want to do more writing for me here in the future. I look forward to what she has to share with us.
Merry Belated Christmas!
I’m sorry I haven’t been as active on the blog lately. I blame my holiday laziness, but I did whip up some cute cupcakes this past week that I want to share with you. I hope your families had wonderful get-togethers for the holidays these past few weeks no matter what you celebrate at this time of the year!
For a Christmas party I went to this past Friday I made two cupcake decorating ideas that I’d seen floating around the internet this past month. The first were these cute reindeer cupcakes:
And the others were these Christmas Tree cupcakes:
Both were fairly easy to make but took a long time to put together. For the less experienced decorator, I’d suggest the reindeer ones. I think even kids could put these together. The supplies you’d need to make these are a cupcake (made from scratch or boxed mix), chocolate frosting, Nila wafers, round candies in white, brown and red (I used peanut butter M&Ms for the brown and red noses and white coconut M&Ms for the eyes), black gel frosting for the eye pupils, and pretzels. If I were to do this one again I’d chose smaller pretzels. It’s probably pretty self explanatory by looking at the pictures how to construct them, but I’ll give a quick run down of how I put them together anyway.
First frost the cupcake and put the Nila wafer on near the bottom of one side of the cupcake, then use some frosting to attach the nose. Next shove the pretzels into the frosting near the top, almost to where they meet with the cookie. It was hard to keep the pretzels from slumping over that’s why I put them so far down on the face. If you use smaller pretzels, this may not be necessary. Then attach the eyes with more frosting near the top of the cookie. Unless you want them to be blind reindeer, add a little black pupil to each eyeball with the gel frosting.
For a little more of a challenge I made these Christmas tree cupcakes as well. These ones require a little bit of frosting technique and frosting tips. Start with a cupcake frosted with white frosting. For the structure of the tree place an ice cream sugar cone upside-down on the white frosting. Then make some green frosting and pipe it on using a closed star tip. Just rest the tip near the ice cream cone and then pull outward as you push the frosting out to make it look like the branchy peaks on the tree.
For decorating the tree you can do a wide variety of things! Some ideas are chocolate covered sunflower seeds, sprinkles, small candies like mini M&Ms, etc. I used some light blue pearl candy sprinkles I had on hand but the decorations are limitless. You could even try to find a star shaped candy as a tree topper.
If you made cupcakes for the holidays this year I’d love to see them! You can either post a link to them in a comment below or post a picture on my Facebook page!
UPDATED WITH WINNER!
Congratulations to Abby Norton! You were chosen by Rafflecopter’s random selection process via random.org.
I have emailed the winner and waiting upon reply. If I haven’t heard back from Abby by the end of Saturday (12/17), I will chose another winner.
I’ve only made cake pops once and found them to be a little difficult to shape and decorate but the folks at My Little Cupcake have created a set of molds that help in the production of cake pops. It all started with the cupcake cake pop mold:
This little mold forms the cutest cupcake shaped pops ever allowing for unique cake pops that are not just sphere shaped. Recently they added three other mold shapes to their shop: cone (perfect for Christmas trees), sphere (if you want to make perfectly formed traditional cake pops), and heart (great for heart shapes, but I’ve seen it used for Reindeer as well!).
For the cake pop filling, My Little Cupcake uses a non-bake method using Oreos and cream cheese (also known as Oreo truffles) but you can also use the Bakerella method of baking a cake and crumbling it up with frosting for the moist cake filling. Either way will work.
My Little Cupcake has offered this How To video for making the filling and using the cake pop molds.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHYFuVVL2ZE&w=560&h=315]
Now that you know how to use the molds, here’s the fun part! My Little Cupcake has graciously offered to give away a variety 4-pack of their molds to one of my readers (ARV $22.95)! I don’t even have a set of these yet (It’s definitely on my wish list though!)
TO ENTER (Required): Use the Rafflecopter entry form on my Facebook* page to enter the contest. Click here to go to the Rafflecopter entry form.
Make sure to leave a valid email address in the required entry space because that is how I will contact the winner.
Besides the required entry, you may also get up to three extra optional entries by doing any of the below:
If you do any of the above, make sure to enter for each action on the Rafflecopter form or it won’t count toward the giveaway.
Remember, you must go to the Giveaway tab on my Facebook page to enter and follow the instructions there. No entries in the comment section of this blog will count.
The giveaway will end December 14th, 2011 at 9:01 pm PST (12/15 12:01am EST).
The winner will be chosen via Rafflecopter’s random selection process powered by random.org and notified by email within 24 hours of the end of the giveaway. Winner will have 72 hours to respond or another winner will be chosen. The prize will be shipped directly from My Little Cupcake to the winner’s address.
Must be at least 18 years of age and a resident of the U.S. to enter.
Please read the Official Rules before you enter.
This giveaway is sponsored by My Little Cupcake. I was not compensated for hosting this giveaway and any opinions about this product are my own.
*This promotion is in no way sponsored, endorsed or administered by, or associated with, Facebook. I hereby release Facebook of any liability.
