Red Velvet Success and Another Frosted Mess

In connection with the S'Mores mix purchase at World Market, I also bought a red velvet with vanilla bean frosting cake mix from sof'ella. So, I baked red velvet cupcakes last weekend at varying degrees of success.

The cake was fairly simple to concoct and turned out very well. It raised better than other store bought cake mixes I've used in the past and the consistency was somewhat dense, but with the right amount of moisture. As for the frosting, well, it turned out too thin again. The mix didn't call for powdered sugar, but I added it in an attempt to thicken it. No luck. The frosting tasted good; but dripped everywhere. For the sake of the pic, I cheated and ended up using tub frosting.

I'm not sure what's going wrong with the frosting. I'm following the directions. Even this time, I used the minimum of the two to four tablespoons of water that the directions called for. If anyone has suggestions on my frosting dilemma, please post them in the comments. 

Italian Dream

Earlier this week, I tried Crave Cupcakes' Italian Cream cupcake for the first time at our coworker's birthday lunch. It's made with vanilla butter cake with toasted coconut and walnuts, topped with a sweet mascarpone cream cheese frosting.

As I've always said, I'm not a fan of the sweet and salty combination (except for that salted caramel); especially nuts. But this is a crusade, so I must try as many cupcake flavors as possible. This blog would get pretty boring if I only ate strawberry and vanilla every time.

OK, enough of my sidebar comments. Back to the review... The cake was light, fluffy and had a yummy vanilla flavor. The walnuts were a bit bigger than I anticipated and ended up picking some out. I did not taste the cocount, however. The frosting was creamy and tasty. Aside from the walnut chunks, this was a delicious cupcake.

Experimenting S'more

With a birthday certificate from World Market, I bought some dessert mixes. The one I tried last weekend was S'mores Cupcake Kit by a company named Jo Cupcake. It included a chocolate cake mix, graham cracker crumbs, chocolate chunks, marshmallow frosting mix and eight bonfire cupcake aprons.

The ingredients say it makes eight cupcakes, but I struggled to fill seven cupcake liners. I baked it at the minimum recommended time, which was 16 minutes. In the meantime, I made the frosting. I always have trouble with frostings from scratch because the butter has to be the right temperature and inevitably, the consistency of the frosting usually ends up being too thin. That was the case again this time, so I added more powdered sugar. And more. And then some more. And a bit more. And yet a little more. You get the idea. Anyway, here's the result...

As for the taste test, the cake was a bit dry. I think the recommended time should have been a few minutes less. Still couldn't get the frosting quite thick enough, but I was afraid that adding any more powdered sugar would have just made it unbearably sweet. It was already really sweet. And, I didn't care much for the chocolate chunks.

These cupcakes were good, but needed more mix and some adjustments to the baking directions.

We're having another birthday lunch for a coworker tomorrow, so watch out for my review of a Crave flavor I'll be trying for the first time.

June Cupcake Specials

Check out this month's specials...

Sprinkles

May 25-June 24:

• Key Lime: tangy juice and zest of fresh key limes in both the cake and frosting.

June 22-July 8:

• Lemon Blueberry: lemon cake with wild blueberries, topped with lemon cream cheese frosting.

Sugarbaby's

New menu flavors:

• Lemon Blueberry: sweet lemon chiffon cake with fresh blueberries, topped with lemon blueberry cream cheese frosting.
• Italian Cream: traditional coconut pecan Italian cream cake with vanilla cream cheese filling and cream cheese frosting.
• Snickerdoodle: light snickerdoodle spice cake dusted with cinnamon and sugar, topped with brown sugar cinnamon cream cheese frosting.
• Pina Colada: pineapple cake with sweet pina colada buttercream, toasted coconut and a paper umbrella.

SWEET

New menu flavors:

• Hummingbird
• Lemon Blueberry
• Gluten-Free Chocolate
• Gluten-Free Red Velvet

Crave and Sprinkles are also featuring graduation and Father's Day decorations on some of their standard flavor cupcakes.