Category Archives: Cupcakes

Jan 1 2013

New Year’s Eve Champagne Cupcakes

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Happy New Year everyone!

It is a time for resolutions, new beginnings, and nursing your hangover from last night’s party! If you didn’t already have more than your share of champagne for the year, you’ve got to try out these fancy champagne cupcakes.

This endeavor was full of firsts for me. It was the first time making cupcakes with alcohol and the first time I measured all my dry ingredients using a kitchen scale instead of measuring cups. I’ve learned that measuring by weight is much more accurate. I’ll have a video explaining how to measure flour by weight up soon if you don’t already know how to do it.

I found the recipe for the cake and frosting at Gimme Some Oven last week and thought these cupcakes would be a great addition to the fancy pajama party my friends throw for New Year’s Eve each year. I followed the recipe from Gimme Some Oven exactly and they came out pretty good. The frosting is very sweet but the cakes are light and compliment it well. I wish the champagne flavor was more apparent in these cupcakes, but they still taste great regardless.

For decorating these babies, I wanted to do something elegant. I found a tutorial for making 4th of July sparkler cupcake picks from Two Shades of Pink and modified it for my New Year’s Eve theme. Instead of using wooden skewers (I had difficulty finding them), I used those little coffee stirrer straws. Color-wise the stirrers went with my color scheme better anyway. I found that I needed to use a little hot glue to shape them more because tying them in the middle with a string didn’t poof them into a bursting shape very well.

To make the champagne topper, I used some scrap card stock in green and red and a wrapper from a white chocolate Lindor truffle. I marked out a bottle shape on the green paper and then used bits and pieces of the candy wrapper for the foil accents and label. For a little extra touch I cut a little tiny band out of the red paper and glued it over the foil on the neck of the bottle.

To make these cupcakes really sparkle, I hot glued some rhinestone ribbon around the tops of the cupcake liners after they were done baking. One thing I learned from this is make sure to get all of the hot glue strings off of the cupcakes before you frost them. They are tricky to find.

Have a wonderful new year! Did you do anything fun for New Year’s Eve?

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Oct 30 2012

A Halloween Treat: Maggot and Worm Cupcakes

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Happy Halloween folks! Creep out your friends and family with these simple but gross maggot and worm cupcakes! I’m not kidding, they were easy to make. This was my first time working with fondant and it was pretty fun. It’s like sugar clay.

I’ve had a lot going on lately what with moving and Halloween costumes, so I planned to make some quick cupcakes for the Halloween party I went to. I found an awesome recipe for a doctored chocolate cake mix from My Baking Addiction. She fancied up a regular ol’ box of chocolate cake mix into something moist and delicious. Check out her website for the recipe!

For the frosting, I used Savory Sweet Life’s Chocolate Buttercream Frosting recipe. I love this frosting because it’s chocolately, not too sweet, and tastes great with chocolate cake.

You could put these creepy cupcake toppers on any type of cupcake though. It’s not difficult to make them either. I chose to go the store-bought route with my fondant this time since I’d never used it before. Some people suggested I make marshmallow fondant. Maybe next time.

If you start with white fondant, color the fondant a little bit at a time with gel or icing dyes. Liquid food coloring might thin out the fondant too much. Gel-like coloring is best. I added the coloring to the fondant with a toothpick and kneaded it until the color was uniform.

Make the shapes for your maggots and worms just like you would when you were a kid playing with clay. I flattened out a separate piece of fondant for the band on the worm and attached it after I had rolled out the worm’s body.

Clay tools are handy when sculpting fondant. I have this basic set I found on Amazon.

I used a small tool that I could easily make impressions on the fondant to create the ring indentations on the worms and maggots. If the fondant gets sticky from the moisture on your hands, have a little powdered sugar on hand to sprinkle on the fondant and your hands to dry it up.

Press your tool into the fondant all the way around the worms and maggots. I drew some features on the maggots with a food marker too.

To make them even more realistic, I made a sugary glaze to brush on top of the maggots and worms once I had placed them on the cupcakes. The glaze recipe is below.

Print
Sugary Glaze

Ingredients

  • 1/4 cup sugar
  • 1 tbs cornstarch
  • 1/2 cup water
  • 1 tbs corn syrup

Instructions

  1. Bring the sugar and 1/2 of the water (1/4 cup) to a boil.
  2. Dissolve the cornstarch in the remaining water. Add to the boiling water and cook till clear and thick.
  3. Stir in the corn syrup. Bring back to a boil and remove from heat.
  4. Let cool and then brush onto your fondant.

Notes

*If you let it cool too long, the mixture will be come gelatine-like and too thick to spread. *This recipe will make more than enough glaze. You can cut the recipe in half if you want.

https://shaneskillercupcakes.com/2012/10/a-halloween-treat-maggot-and-worm-cupcakes/

Are you making any Halloween treats this year? What about costumes? I love Halloween costumes and I would love to see yours. Post a picture below or on my Facebook page of your spooky treats and costumes.

Have a wonderful, safe, and happy Halloween!

Here’s a peek at my Roy Lichtenstein comic book girl costume.

By the way, don’t forget to enter my giveaway for a copy of Lily Vanilli’s A Zombie Ate My Cupcake. Giveaway ends Oct. 31st!

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Sep 9 2012

Baby Shower Cupcakes

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A friend of mine asked me to make some baby shower cupcakes for her brother and sister-in-law and these were the cute cupcakes I came up with. They aren’t super original, but they were fun to make and easy to decorate.

If I had had time to experiment, I would have liked to try making fondant rubber duckies, but with only a couple of days to plan and make these babies, mini rubber ducky toys were the way to go. It also kept the cost down since fondant can be a little pricey.

The cupcakes are spice cupcakes that I made using this recipe. The recipe instructs you to mix the ingredients together strangely, so by the suggestion from several of the comments, I mixed the butter and brown sugar together before adding the rest of the wet ingredients to it and mixed the dry ingredients separately. Then I added the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients a little bit at a time until it was all combined. The batter will be very thick.

The cupcakes turned out very dense, almost like a muffin but still light like cake. The only thing I’d change to this recipe would be to add more spices! It looked like there would be plenty of spices in it from reading the ingredients, but they didn’t end up as spicy as I wanted them to be. Overall, I liked them, especially warmed up. Warming them did something to the cupcakes that made them very moist and brought out the spice flavor better. Frankly, the cake is so good on its own, it doesn’t need frosting.

If you do want to add frosting, use a cream cheese frosting. I was asked to keep the frosting light for these cupcakes so I tried using Neufchatel cheese instead of cream cheese because it has less fat and calories, but it never got stiff.  Only use this type of cheese for this frosting if you don’t mind it being a little soupy. Otherwise, stick to regular cream cheese. A quick recipe for the frosting is below.

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Quick Cream Cheese Frosting

Serving Size: 24 cupcakes

Ingredients

  • 1 - 8oz package of cream cheese, softened
  • 1/4 cup softened butter
  • 3 cups of sifted confectioners' sugar
  • 1 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
  • food coloring (optional)

Instructions

  1. 1. Whip cream cheese and butter together in a large bowl.
  2. 2. Mix in the vanilla
  3. 3. Adding a little bit at a time, mix in the confectioners' suger until the frosting reaches the consistency you want.
  4. 4. For colored frosting, add food coloring a couple drops at a time to reach desired color
https://shaneskillercupcakes.com/2012/09/baby-shower-cupcakes/

To decorate your cupcakes, find items that go with the theme of your baby shower. There are plenty of ideas out there. I chose to get “It’s a boy!” cupcake picks but these could easily be homemade too. Making them by hand adds a little personal flair to the cupcakes.

If you’d rather go the easy route, and top the cupcakes with little toys instead of fondant figurines, check out party stores or craft stores for cute items. I found these mini duckies in the toy and party favor section of Party City. Sometimes baby shower trinkets can be found at stores like Michaels as well. Make sure to clean the toys well before sticking them on to food that will be eaten.

For extra pizazz, sprinkle the tops of the cupcakes with sanding sugar, sprinkles and/or candy pearls.

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Jul 4 2012

Fourth of July Watermelon Cupcakes

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This Fourth of July dessert is not red, white, and blue. Gasp! It’s not that I’m not patriotic, but there are so many red, white, and blue desserts going around at this time of year, I wanted to make something a little different and more summer themed for the party I’m going to. I got a little inspiration from here and there, but the recipe and design is from Bird on a Cake. I adapted her watermelon cake into a cupcake sized treat and decorated the tops a little different. I also chose to modify the frosting by nixing the cream cheese and opting to go for a buttercream instead. I used this recipe for the frosting but left out the vanilla and added the watermelon puree and watermelon jello from the original frosting recipe from Bird on a Cake. Start with the recipes I linked above. For decorating instructions, look below:

You’ll want to have a lot of red food dye. Gels are the best for getting that strong deep color. I picked up one of those red icing dye pots from Michaels and used a good 2/3rds of it between the batter and the frosting. Just keep adding dye until it’s the color of watermelon. I had my real watermelon cut open when I was dying the batter so I could color match it. I think the batter ended up being a better color than the frosting I put on top.

Bake the cupcakes for only 20 minutes as opposed to what it says in the cake recipe. Let them cool completely before you frost the cupcakes. The amount of frosting in the Quick Buttercream frosting recipe linked above is plenty of frosting for all of the cupcakes even though it may not look like it. I didn’t think so and ended up opening a small can of white frosting instead of making more.

Since you have to pre-color your frosting break it up like this: about half should go to the dark green color, a quarter of the frosting goes to the watermelon red color, and the last quarter can be separated into the light green and the white. Since you put butter and the pink watermelon jello in the frosting the white won’t be super white but I think that will look ok. If you prefer it to be extra white, you can open a can of white frosting.

I didn’t trust that I had originally made enough frosting and ended up with a ton of red frosting left and used the white can of frosting for the light green and the white frosting. If you have a better idea for separating the frosting for the right amount for each color, please leave me any suggestions in the comments.

For the “cut open” watermelon cupcakes, frost the center of the cupcakes with the red frosting, then pipe some of the dark green frosting around the edge with a #12 frosting tip, pushing downwards as you go to flatten the frosting out. With a #4 tip, pipe the white frosting in between the green and red frosting for the rind part of the watermelon. You may want to switch the frosting tips for this part if you’d rather have more white than green showing. Lastly, push a couple of mini chocolate chips into the top for seeds. You could also use black candy coated sunflower seeds.

The “whole watermelon” cupcakes are even easier to make. Frost the entire top of the cupcakes with the dark green and then pipe the light green in squiggly curved lines with the #4 tip. When these ones are cut open they look pretty cool. Unfortunately my mini chocolate chips fell to the bottom even though I followed Bird on a Cake’s suggestion to coat them in flour before putting them in the batter.

These cupcakes ended up being very strongly flavored of watermelon. If you try Bird on a Cake’s cream cheese frosting recipe, let me know how it tastes with the cake. I decided to use buttercream mainly because I am making some bacon-wrapped cream cheese jalapeño poppers for the same party and don’t want everything tasting like cream cheese, but I imagine the watermelon flavored cream cheese frosting is great with this cake too.

HAPPY FOURTH OF JULY!

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Jun 24 2012

Mickey and Minnie Mouse Cupcakes

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Hello! It’s been a long time since I last posted up some cupcakes. You know how it is. You lose inspiration, get lazy, and then avoid your blog like the plague. Sorry I’ve been gone so long. I think Shane’s Killer Cupcakes will be much more active this summer.

The idea for these Mickey and Minnie cupcakes has been rattling around in my brain for a good half of a year now, but I wanted to make them special for my sister-in-law so I waited until her birthday to make them. I’m so excited how they turned out.

They aren’t too difficult to make either! I used black candy melts to coat the mini Oreo cookie ears and the tops of the cupcakes. If I were to do this again I’d find a slightly larger cookie. Maybe a Nilla Wafer would work. I think regular Oreos might be too big. I found a cute bow candy mold for Minnie’s bows, and used dots of white chocolate and red candy melts to fill it in.

The cupcakes are made from my mom’s wine cake recipe. It’s usually made into a bundt cake but I chose to use it here because I needed a light cupcake so the cupcake liners were still bright, and the cake tastes like egg nog, which I thought might taste good with the candy melts. The recipe for this cake is below.

This recipe makes 12 Mickey and 12 Minnie cupcakes. Here are the step-by-step instructions on how to put together these super cute cupcakes:

Supplies Needed

  • A bag of black and a bag of red candy melts
  • Some white chocolate (about an 1/8 cup)
  • Bow candy mold
  • 48 round cookies somewhere in between the size of a quarter and a half dollar
  • 12 cupcake liners in red and 12 in red with white polka dots
  • 24 little white paper ovals for Mickey’s pants’ buttons
  • 24 cupcakes

Directions

  1. I made the cupcakes first so that they could be cooling while I worked on some of the decorations. If you want to try the Wine Cake that I used, the recipe is below.
  2. While the cupcakes are cooling, start your work on the candy bows and candy covered cookies. For the bows clean your 
    candy mold and dry it well. Water does not mix well with the melted candy. Melt some white chocolate in a ziplock bag in 30 second increments. Once it is soft enough to squeeze out, cut a tiny bit off of the corner of the bag and pipe out tiny little dots into the candy mold. Once you are done, put the candy mold in the freezer to let the white chocolate harden. While the mold is in the freezer, melt some red candy melts the same way as you did the white chocolate in a ziplock bag. You will need probably no more than half the bag of red candy melts. When you are done melting the red candy, pull the mold out of the freezer and pipe the red candy into the mold on top of the white chocolate dots. Make sure to get the red candy into the little crevices well. As before, freeze the mold when you’re done piping the red candy. They should pop out of the mold easily once they are hardened.
  3. For the ears, melt some of the black candy in a small bowl. Add a little canola oil if you want the consistency to be thinner. Dunk the cookies in the candy, fish them out with a fork, and place them on a cookie tray lined with wax paper. This process goes rather quickly. I was a little disappointed that the black candy melts were more like a dark grey than actual black. Chill these in the fridge or freezer as well.
  4. When the cupcakes are cool, melt about the rest of the black candy (I stirred in about 1-1/2 tablespoons of canola oil to it to make it thinner) and dip the tops of the cupcakes in it. If you can’t get the melted candy all the way to the edges, take a knife, dip it in the candy, and spread it on. While the candy is still wet, shove two ears into the top of the cupcake. If you’re making a Minnie one, put a bow on top too.
  5. To finish off the Mickey cupcakes, glue two little white buttons to the front of each cupcake liner. 

Print
Wine Cake

Serving Size: 24 cupcakes

Ingredients

  • 1 pkg yellow cake mix (I use Duncan Hines) Make sure it doesn't already have pudding mix in it
  • 1 (3.4 oz) pkg vanilla instant pudding
  • 4 eggs
  • 3/4 cup oil
  • 3/4 cup med. dry Sherry
  • 1 tsp nutmeg

Instructions

  1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
  2. Combine all of the ingredients. Mix with a beater for about 5 minutes at medium speed.
  3. Fill each cupcake liner about 2/3rds full with the batter.
  4. Bake for 20 minutes or until done. Check on them at 15 minutes.
  5. Let them cool in the pan for 5-10 minutes.

Notes

This recipe was originally for a bundt cake. If you'd like to make it into a bundt cake, make as directed and then cook for 40 minutes or until done. Let it cool in the pan for 5 minutes. Then turn it out onto a plate and when it is fully cool, sprinkle with powdered sugar.

https://shaneskillercupcakes.com/2012/06/mickey-and-minnie-mouse-cupcakes/

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Feb 26 2012

And The Oscar Goes To….Oscar Cupcakes!

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Sorry this is up a little late considering the Academy Awards are over by now, but here is what I made for an Oscar party I went to tonight. I got the idea the other day from a post over on Hoosier Homemade. I couldn’t see their pictures up close very well but I think I did a decent job recreating them. Luckily I threw a Hollywood costume party last year and had a ton of decorations left over for the photo shoot set-up.

For the cake part, I used the chocolate cake recipe from this post that I shared with you last month. I’ve been so tired of making buttercream icing lately that I chose to make some cream cheese frosting this time. I used this recipe but had to alter it a little bit. If made as instructed in that recipe, it has a very strong cream cheese flavor. For some things like a carrot cake that might work, but I wanted something that was a little sweeter, so I added at least another cup of powdered sugar to the called-for two.  If I made it again I might even add a little more powdered sugar. The flavor was still pretty strong but it did taste good.

The Oscar statue toppers are made of yellow melting candy that I drew out on some wax paper. To make it easier for drawing, print out this template (PDF) and put it under the wax paper on a cookie sheet. Fill in the black area with the candy melts. Then sprinkle it with gold sugar sprinkles. Harden them up in the fridge for a bit and then they can be shoved into the top of the frosting at the end.

I used a #1M tip to pipe the frosting. If you don’t have frosting bags, get some heavy duty freezer ziplock bags, cut a corner out and shove the frosting tip through it from the inside out. Don’t cut the hole too big or the tip will go all the way through. Then heap the frosting inside the bag and push it down to the opening. Put more of the gold sprinkles on the top of the frosting too.

The Oscars go for a little stroll on the Hollywood Walk of Fame

Did you watch the Academy Awards this year? How did you like it? I felt there was a lot of stuff that could have been cut out and I was disappointed that they didn’t let the Best Original Song nominees perform. I was looking forward to seeing the Muppets perform “Man or Muppet.” I’m glad it won though. What were some of your favorite and least favorite moments?

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