Tuesday night, I set out to make all three treats for Halloween/Dad's Birthday. I had been prepared since the weekend just in case the hurricane kept me inside until Halloween--I had all the ingredients I needed.
For work, I decided to put together some vanilla bean cupcakes with actual beans and vanilla butter cream frosting. Sweet and simple! I used the very basic vanilla cupcake recipe that I've used in the past from www.cooks.com because it only has 8 ingredients! Very easy which makes it VERY easy to put your own twist on it :) I decided to add just one vanilla bean (which adds incredible vanilla flavor along with the 2 tsp. extract) and it made these cupcakes to die for (as one co-worker said after she bit into one). I stuck with the classic vanilla butter cream frosting, used a 1M tip to ice the "wormy" cupcakes, sprinkled crushed chocolate grahams on top, planted a worm in there, and there it was!
If you use this recipe, I highly recommend adding a vanilla bean. Also, don't forget to ALWAYS finish off the mixing with the DRY INGREDIENTS...mix until JUST combined so your finished product doesn't become tough.
And there ya have it...Dirty Vanilla Cupcakes ;)
I used the rest of the butter cream, mixed red and yellow icing color (yeah I know right, they didn't have a freakin' plain orange color!!!), grabbed the spatula, and iced the other half of those babies! The orange was a perfect pumpkin color and was very festive. I was supposed to save some butter cream to color black for punkinhead faces but I forgot--so unfortunately, these punkinheads had no faces...all tastes the same, right!?
The cupcakes were very moist, short and sweet but very tasty. Someone even said that when the carrier was opened, it smelled like vodka...well that's cause of my long lasting, homemade vanilla extract!! Which by the way, is definitely going to last me forever; it is barely below the neck of the wine bottle for gosh sakes. I encourage EVERYONE to make their own extract..seriously...ask me for tips!
Onnnnn to the next treat for the night.
Pumpkin streusel cupcakes made with Truvia with homemade whipped cream and chopped, sugared pecans.
This was one of Liv's Bakery's sort of made up treats minus the actual pumpkin cupcake recipe. I pulled this recipe from my newest cookbook (thanks to my sister!) but instead, substituted Truvia for the sugar. Never have I EVER used "fake" sweetener when baking but I thought I'd try something new! I really think I am getting braver and braver as my baking journey continues...
For those of you who don't know what Truvia is, it's a zero calorie sugar replacement that comes from the Stevia plant. I went online to find the equivalent to sugar and it said for 1/3 cup sugar (which is what the original recipe called for since I was only making 6 cupcakes) to use about 7 packets of Truvia. This was just NOT enough. I ended up adding 4 more packets to get rid of the extreme, bitter taste from the pumpkin puree. I added streusel that I had frozen from the pumpkin muffins and baked! I was a little nervous when they came out a yellow-ish color so I decided to try one and they were pretty tasty with the streusel! It made it sweeter and I just KNEW the homemade whipped cream was going to do the final trick.
Right before dinner at my parents, I whipped up the cream (Mom, thanks for the extra sugar!!), added the toasted, sugared pecans, and everyone loved 'em! My cousin even licked the whipped cream bowl clean.
I HIGHLY recommend using whipped cream if you don't have all the ingredients for butter cream or any other type of icing. It's so simple and adds that lil sunin' sunin' to an already sweet dessert. All it takes is some whipping cream, a little sugar, and a tsp. of vanilla.
I will definitely keep adding streusel to my delicious pumpkin desserts!
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| Shawn the Dragon! I'm sure he wanted a cupcake! |
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