Category Archives: Recipes

Oct 31 2011

The Last Cupcake: A Zombie Cupcake Deluge (And Other Halloween Treats) {Recipe}

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Halloween is my favorite holiday (with Christmas at a close second), so I try to go all out when it comes to costumes and treats.   This year I went with a zombie theme and tried to recreate the Shirt.Woot.com t-shirt design called The Last Cupcake as well as make the scariest zombie costume I could think of.  Both turned out better than expected!

I made the zombie bodies with a template I got from Skip To My Lou and cut the tops off with my Provo Craft paper shapers. I think it was a grass design. I have to give credit to death by cupcake for giving me the idea to make the arms and weapons from paper. It really helped make the cupcakes look exactly like the shirt design.

I also made a couple other Halloween treats for the party I went to this weekend. Since I only used 13 cupcakes to make the zombie display, I divided the rest into skulls and spiders.

I decorated the skulls with white frosting, white jelly beans, M&Ms, half of a mini Oreo, and black gel for the nostrils. The spiders were decorated with chocolate frosting, candy coated sunflower seeds for the eyes, white jimmies for the fangs and metal spider cupcake stands from Target.

The last treat I made were chocolate truffles. They always go over well and are super easy to make. I found the recipe on the Kraft website once and was surprised at how few ingredients went into them.


They can be decorated with pretty much anything. I used a combination of candy melts, unsweetened cocoa, coconut flakes, powdered sugar, Halloween sprinkles and sanding sugar. To make them a little more festive for the holiday, I displayed them in little wooden coffins that I got from Michaels that I painted and decorated with glittery designs.

{Recipe}

Easy Chocolate Truffles

INGREDIENTS

  • 1 pkg. (8 oz.) PHILADELPHIA Cream Cheese, softened
  • 3 cups  powdered sugar
  • 1-1/2 pkg. (12 squares) BAKER’S Semi-Sweet Chocolate, melted
  • 1-1/2 tsp.  vanilla

DIRECTIONS

  • BEAT cream cheese in large bowl with electric mixer on medium speed until smooth. Gradually add sugar, mixing until well blended.
  • ADD melted chocolate and vanilla; mix well. Refrigerate 1 hour or until chilled.
  • SHAPE into 1-inch balls. Roll in walnuts, cocoa, powdered sugar or coconut. Store in refrigerator.

SUGGESTIONS

  • For coatings: Ground walnuts, unsweetened cocoa, powdered sugar and/or flake coconut. The sky is the limit for coatings. Come up with your own toppings if you want.
  • Add liqueur: Make as directed except omit the vanilla and add 2-3 tbsp. of almond, coffee or orange-flavored liqueur to the mixture. If you want to use all three, separate the mixture into thirds and flavor each third with one tbsp. of the liqueurs.
Recipe via Kraft Foods.

Happy Halloween Everyone!!

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Shane’s Killer Cupcakes by Shane Russell is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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Oct 20 2011

Pumpkin Pie Bites {Recipe}

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Along with the Severed Witches’ Fingers that I shared with you earlier this month, I also made these Pumpkin Pie Bites by Bakerella last Halloween. They were very tasty and looked so cute!

{Recipe}

Pumpkin Pie Bites

INGREDIENTS:

  • 2 refrigerated ready-to roll pie crusts
  • 8 oz. cream cheese, room temperature
  • 1/2 cup sugar
  • 1 cup canned pumpkin
  • 3 eggs
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla
  • 1 teaspoon pumpkin pie spice
  • Pumpkin-shaped cookie cutter

Optional

  • 1/2 cup chocolate morsels
  • vegetable oil
  • re-sealable plastic bags

DIRECTIONS:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2. Use cookie cutter to cut 12 pumpkin shapes from each pie crust. You will need to roll the dough thinner than it comes out of the box.
3. Press dough shapes into a 24 cup mini muffin tray. (Make 12 at a time, alternating cups to make sure pie crusts don’t overlap each other.)
4. Apply egg whites from one egg to the top edges of each pie.
5. Mix cream cheese, sugar, canned pumpkin, remaining 2 eggs, vanilla and pumpkin pie spice together until thoroughly combined.
6. Spoon mixture into each pumpkin-shaped pie crust.
7. Bake for 12-15 minutes.
8. Remove pies to cool and repeat with second pie crust. Place the muffin tray in the freezer to cool it quickly for re-use.

Makes 24 pies. Keep refrigerated.

To decorate, melt chocolate in a heat-proof bowl in the microwave on medium. Heat in 30 second intervals, stirring in between until melted. Add a little vegetable oil to make the chocolate more fluid. Transfer to a re-sealable plastic bag and cut the corner off. Drizzle or draw faces on pies.

Note from Bakerella: The cutter I used was 3 3/4 inches wide, but if you don’t have one, don’t worry. Just use a round cutter around that size or slightly smaller to cut circle shapes out of the dough. Then make stems with the scraps. Press each stem over the edge and down the side of the dough before filling.

Pumpkin pie spice is a mixture of cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg and allspice.

For detailed pictures of the process check out Bakerella’s website.

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Shane's Killer Cupcakes by Shane Russell is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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Oct 15 2011

Mini Pumpkin Oreo Cheesecakes {Recipe}

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A friend’s birthday was this week so I decided to make something for him but also keep it a little autumn themed. I searched through all of my recipes, including ones I’d bookmarked on Pinterest, and decided upon Mini Pumpkin Oreo Cheesecakes from Inside BruCrew Life. The recipe is super simple and turned out pretty darn good, especially if you like Oreos (there’s two whole cookies in each one!). The recipe calls for whipped cream for the topping so I used this Sturdy Whipped Cream Frosting recipe from Allrecipes.com.

The cheesecake part came out a little paler than I was expecting from the photo on Inside BruCrew Life, so I would probably add a little orange food coloring to it if you want it to have a good bright pumpkin color. Even my picture is a little deceiving. The actual cheesecake part was slightly lighter in color than the pictures would suggest.

For the construction of the whipped frosting, I modified the instructions a little. It says to mix all of the ingredients except the whipping cream first and then add the whipping cream to it and continue to mix. Some people in the comment section said that they were never able to get it to the right consistency this way, so they whipped the cream separately and then folded it into the cream cheese mixture. I chose to do it this way and it seemed to work pretty well.

{Recipe}

For the Pumpkin Oreo Cheesecake

via Inside BruCrew Life

INGREDIENTS

  • 2-8 oz pkgs. cream cheese, softened
  • 1/2 cup sugar
  • 2 eggs
  • 2 tbsp. sour cream
  • 1 tsp. vanilla
  • 1/2 cup canned pumpkin
  • oreos
  • whipped cream

DIRECTIONS

Preheat oven to 350* Place cupcake liners in a muffin pan. Beat the cream cheese until creamy. Add the sugar and cream again. Add the eggs one at a time beating after each one. Add the rest of the ingredients and beat again. Place one whole oreo in the bottom of the cupcake liners and fill up the liner 3/4 full with the cheesecake batter. Push another whole oreo into the top of the batter. Bake for 20-22 minutes. Cool in pan for 15-20 min before removing and placing on a wire rack to finish cooling. Keep refrigerated. Top with whipped cream and oreo sprinkles before serving. Makes 24.

For the whipped topping

via Allrecipes.com

INGREDIENTS

  • 1 (8 ounce) package reduced-fat cream cheese, softened
  • 1/2 cup white sugar
  • 1 tsp. vanilla extract
  • 1/2 teaspoon almond extract (optional)
  • 2 cups heavy cream

DIRECTIONS

Combine the cream cheese, sugar, vanilla extract and almond extract, if you’re using it, in a large mixing bowl or the bowl of a stand mixer. Fit the mixer with the whisk attachment and mix on medium speed until smooth. While the mixture is still whipping, slowly pour in the heavy cream (or do the folding method I explained above). Stop and scrape the bottom of the bowl a couple of times while you continue whipping until the cream can hold a stiff peak. **Don’t over whip or it will lose all of its air and become the consistency of butter**

If you make these, let me know how it went for you and if you tried anything different. I think if I make these again I’ll add a little pumpkin spice or cinnamon to the cheesecake part.

Tip Junkie handmade projects

Manic Mother

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Oct 5 2011

Severed Witches’ Fingers {Recipe}

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Last Halloween I made these Severed Witches’ Fingers for a party I went to. They were very easy to make and can be altered in many ways depending on how you want them to look.

I made mine look like severed ladies’ fingers with red nail polish, but I’ve seen quite a few variations that also look great.

Here are a couple other styles:

1. Green witch fingers via maiapapaya:

Dye the dough with green food coloring and use almonds with skin instead of blanched ones.

2. Bloody crusty unpainted nails via meemoskitchen:

For these, use a little red sugar gel or frosting under the almonds to make the nails looks gross and bloody.

{Recipe}

Severed Witches’ Fingers

INGREDIENTS:

  • 2 tablespoons red food coloring
  • 30 blanched almonds
  • 2 large eggs
  • 1/4 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
  • 8 tablespoons unsalted butter (1 stick), room temperature
  • 1/2 cup confectioners’ sugar
  • 5 tablespoons granulated sugar
  • Pinch of salt
  • 1 and 2/3 cups all-purpose flour

DIRECTIONS:

  1. Heat oven to 350 degrees. Line two baking sheets with Silpats (French nonstick baking mats) or parchment paper, and set aside.
  2. Place food coloring in a shallow bowl. Using a small paintbrush, color one rounded half of each almond. Set aside to dry.
  3. Separate 1 egg. Set aside the white. In a small bowl, whisk together yolk, remaining egg, and vanilla. Set aside.
  4. In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, combine butter, confectioners’ sugar, granulated sugar, and salt. Beat on medium speed until well combined. Add egg mixture, and beat until smooth, about 2 minutes. Add the flour, and mix on low speed just until incorporated. Wrap the dough in plastic, and chill until firm, 20 to 30 minutes.
  5. Divide the dough in half. Work with one piece at a time, keeping remaining dough covered with plastic wrap and chilled. Divide the first half into 15 pieces. On a lightly floured surface, roll each piece back and forth with palms into finger shapes, 3 to 4 inches long. Pinch dough in two places to form knuckles. Score each knuckle lightly with the back of a small knife. Transfer fingers to prepared baking sheets. Repeat with remaining dough.
  6. When all fingers are formed, brush lightly with egg white. Position almond nails; push into dough to attach.
  7. Bake until lightly browned, about 12 minutes. Cool completely.

Recipe via Martha Stewart

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Shane's Killer Cupcakes by Shane Russell is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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Apr 27 2011

Inverse Apple Cobbler Cake + Dinner! {Recipe}

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I know I haven’t posted any cupcakes lately, but regular cakes keep coming up that I want to try. I’m planning a few new cupcake ideas for the next couple months so stay tuned. Until then, enjoy my write up on a delicious meal that my good friend Amber and I teamed up to make last night. Everything turned out so well, we wanted to share our creations with you.

For the dinner portion of the meal head over to Amber’s blog for a delicious Slow Cook Crockpot Roast Beef. It includes roast beef, potatoes, sweet potatoes, peas, onion, apple and other tasty ingredients. Look how lovely it turned out:

We also made the best Garlic Bread I’ve ever had. For instructions on how to make awesome garlic butter for your french bread, jump over to Amber’s blog for that too.

To keep up with the apple theme of the night, we decided to make a cake. We’ve decided to call it Inverse Apple Cobbler Cake because a normal apple cobbler has a lot of apples on the bottom and a crumbly cake-like top but we reversed that a bit for this cake.

Here are the instructions:

Inverse Apple Cobbler Cake

Ingredients

For Cake:

  • 1 box of yellow cake mix (or your favorite yellow cake recipe)
  • cinnamon (we didn’t measure, but I’d guess about 3 tsp.)

For topping

  • 1 can of vanilla or cream cheese frosting (or your favorite white frosting recipe)
  • 3-4 apples*
  • 1 cup water
  • 1 cup tightly packed brown sugar
  • 2-3 tsp. lemon juice
  • cinnamon
  • ground cloves
  • nugmeg
  • ground ginger

*Note: Our cake mix only made about a half of a batch of a normal cake mix. We used 3 apples for the topping, but for a full batch you may need 4. Add a little more water if you add more than 3 apples.

We used a peanut and egg free yellow cake mix from Cherrybrook Kitchen but we doctored it to fit our needs. We followed the cake instructions (add water and butter or margarine) but the cake looked way too dry so we ended up adding one egg to it.  Follow the directions on your cake mix box or recipe to make the batter. Since we planned to make a cinnamon apple topping, we added a bit of cinnamon to the batter too. Then we whipped it up for a couple of minutes.

The cake mix only made enough for about a half batch so we had to get a smaller baking pan to cook it in. Thankfully, Amber’s mother-in-law had the perfect sized Pyrex dish.

We baked the cake in a preheated oven at 350?F for about 25 minutes until it was cooked all the way through. To bake your cake, you should follow your cake mix box or recipe directions. While the cake baked, we started making the apple topping. It’s basically the same thing that goes in an apple cobbler.

Skin your apples and cut them into thin slices. In a pan on the stove at medium-high setting, heat some water and the apple slices until it’s at a boil then lower the temperature to low so that the water is just at a simmer. Add your spices next. We didn’t really measure this out but put a dash of the ground cloves, ginger, and nutmeg and if you really like a lot of cinnamon put a a good amount in (several shakes or so). Also add about half of the brown sugar and all of the lemon juice into the simmering apples and mix everything around. We used the other half of brown sugar at the end once a good portion of the water cooked off.

While the water is simmering, put a lid on the pan, allowing the steam to come out one side a little, and let it sit for a while. Stir often. We had our apples simmer with the lid on for about 15 minutes and then took it off for the final 5-10 minutes. It may not take you nearly as long because we put way too much water in (like close to 2 cups) so you may not need to simmer it as long. Keep an eye on it. When it’s done there won’t be very much water left, and the added brown sugar will caramelize a little. It should become a runny, gooey, brown appley treat and look a little like this:

Once it starts to look like that turn the stove off and let it sit there with the lid on until you’re ready to frost the cake.

By now your cake should be ready to come out of the oven. Ours looked like this when it came out. It looked so good, I was ready to dig into it already!

I fought my impulses and let it cool for a long time before frosting it. In fact we ate Amber’s yummy Slow Cooked Roast Beef while it cooled.

Once the cake was completely cooled we frosted it with the vanilla frosting. If I were to do this again, I’d choose cream cheese frosting instead of vanilla because the cake tasted a bit like carrot cake without the carrots, and cream cheese frosting would have been awesome here. Get it good and frosted and then add your apple topping like so:

 

The combination of the cake, frosting, and soft cinnamon apple topping really complimented each other nicely. I would definitely try this again sometime.

As always, if you give my recipe a try, share pictures of how it turned out on my Facebook page. Also feel free to share pictures of any other desserts you make.

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Shane's Killer Cupcakes by Shane Russell is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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Apr 23 2011

Secret Baking Project Revealed: Rainbow Bundt Cake! {Recipe}

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Ok I finally made that super secret cake I promised you. It was a Rainbow Bundt Cake! I decided to make it because I’d never seen a rainbow bundt cake done like I wanted mine to look like. Every time I found a picture of one online it always had the red layer cover the whole outside and didn’t look very interesting before it was cut into. So I set out to see if I could make one that had the colored stripes on the outside. Here was my result:

I think it turned out rather well. It was a bit darker on the outside than I expected and the frosting (which was supposed to be puffy clouds around the bottom) kind of melted when I transported it to a party.

The inside was a bit of a surprise when I cut into it though:

It was so neon! I liked that it had a little bit of shock value on the inside. As you can see in this photo, my frosting melted and puddled everywhere. It still tasted good though.

Here are the instructions if you want to try your hand at a Rainbow Bundt Cake:

Ingredients

  • 1 box of white cake mix (or your favorite white cake batter recipe)
  • 1 (16 oz) can of white or cream cheese frosting (or your own homemade frosting)
  • Food coloring ( I suggest McCormick Neon food dye)

Note about food dye: I used McCormick Neon food colors (sold at Walmart) mixed with Duff’s Concentrated Color Gels in primary (sold at Michaels). This isn’t any kind of advertisement for them, I’ve just found these food colors worked the best to get the colors I wanted.

Speaking of the colors, after you’ve made the batter according to the box instructions or recipe directions, separate the batter into six different bowls. I put a small amount in one, a slightly larger amount in another, and so on until I had the most amount in the sixth bowl. You color the smallest amount of batter red and the largest amount of batter purple. Color the other batter amounts in the rest of the regular rainbow colors (Orange, Yellow, Green, and Blue).

Once you’ve got the colors that you like. Start spooning it into a bundt pan that has been thoroughly covered inside with cooking spray. My batter ended up pretty thick and that aided in the layering process. I started with the red layer at the bottom of the pan and then spooned the orange layer on top using a spatula to move it around a little. Don’t move it too much though or the colors will start to run together and look more tie-dyed (which would probably look pretty awesome too).

I tried to get the color to go all around the sides first to make sure those striped colors would show up on the outside of the cake. That technique seemed to work pretty well. This layering process took a pretty long time, though, like around 30-40 minutes.

The cake mix instructions that I used said to cook the cake in the preheated oven at 350?F for 37-41 minutes. If you use a cake mix too, see if the box suggests cooking times for bundt cakes. A bundt cake tends to take longer to cook than a regular rectangle cake would.

Once the cake is cooked all the way through (I test it with a wooden skewer), take it out of the oven and shake the pan all the way around with pot holders to loosen the cake from the sides of the pan while it’s still hot. Leave the cake in the pan to cool for about 10 minutes and then flip it over onto your cake platter.

While you let your cake cool the rest of the way, start getting your frosting ready. I’m sure there are many ways to decorate this cake with “cloud” frosting, but I chose to pipe the clouds around the bottom. I think whipped frosting might work better, because the regular frosting I used seemed a bit heavy and started to fall down the sides a little (even before it melted).

When you’re done frosting the cake, then your cake is ready to serve!

Even the cake mess was pretty!

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial. If you try to make this cake too, share your photos on my Facebook page.

Makes 12 servings

Nutrition Facts*   Per Serving

Calories 371; Total Fat 15.3g; Sat. Fat 3.2g; Cholest. 47.5mg; Sodium 368mg; Total Carbs. 56g; Fiber <1g; Sugars 39g; Protein 2.5g

*These Nutrition Facts were calculated by myself using a calorie counter. Actual Nutrition Facts may be different. This is just for guidance.

Tip Junkie handmade projects

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Creative Commons License
Shane's Killer Cupcakes by Shane Russell is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://cupcakeattack.wordpress.com/contact/.

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