HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME!

So today is what I like to call my "special" birthday. 25 on the 25th! It started off great this morning considering I had my very own chauffer :) Thanks to my awesome fiance!

Anywho...

I am getting super excited about my HUGE cupcake order tomorrow! 16 dozen for Kelly and 4 dozen to my mama. I'm using some of my most favorite recipes--carrot cake with Rum Chata frosting, my ultimate vanilla cupcake with vanilla frosting, double chocolate with chocolate frosting, and red velvet with cream cheese frosting! I think the carrot cake are going to turn out SUPER--they were extremely moist the last time I made them for my nephew on his 1st birthday. I was trying to keep it healthy, okay???

For my mom tomorrow, I am making just two dozen double chocolate and two dozen vanilla for her coworker's baby shower. The vanilla are going to have chocolate icing and the chocolate will have blue vanilla icing...it's a boy if you couldn't tell :)

I've got everything prepared for my long day of baking tomorrow. I've already gone ahead and prepped the dry ingredients in large plastic bags for each batch. I'm hoping that will cut down a great amount of my time.

I'll let you know how everything turns out! Good thing the 16 dozen aren't due until Saturday morning because I can always finish them up Friday. It will be a long and hopefully successful journey of cupcake making tomorrow!

Tip of the day: I learned the difference between cake flour and all-purpose flour the other night as I stood there in my kitchen hitting myself because the only thing I forgot at the store was FLOUR.

I had cake flour because that's what the vanilla cupcake recipe calls for. I figured you couldn't just simply substitute this for all-purpose though so I decided to look up the difference.

Most of the time, you should use cake flour when you're not expecting (or needing) your product to rise. This explains why my vanilla cupcake recipe calls for a large amount of baking powder and then some baking soda as well. I suppose I could have added more baking powder in the other recipes had I not felt like going out to get more all-purpose flour. But I just didn't want to risk it!

Enjoy that tip!

See, even Shawn wanted more of the carrot cake cupcakes!

Cheers!