- Close up of the Sesame Street-themed cupcakes
This is one insanely hectic month for me. Looking @ my baking calendar, I think I’ll just schedule sleep for when I’m dead.
Last weekend I was on vacation with some girlfriends (we were being patriotic and celebrating July 4th in PR) and I came back to busyness @ work (yay for quarter end) and braced myself for all my baking projects. This weekend’s order was for a neighbor’s cute little boy’s huge Sesame Street-themed birthday. By huge I mean 7 dozen cupcakes and a dozen minis. I had offered to make the frosting into faces, but I’m kind of glad they just opted for basic designs b/c this was a pretty big order. (Maybe one of these days I’ll make a slew of Sesame Street character faces.) The oven was hot from 1130 am to 230 pm b/c trays kept going in and out. (Our next oven must have a window so I can peek without having to open the door AND must have rack spacing that isn’t so darn close to the heated wires.) I ended up making more than 10 dozen chocolate and vanilla cupcakes, along with 24 minis, and almost 2 gallons of frosting. And as usual, I made Vin try everything and got feedback like, “It tastes like chocolately deliciousness” and “The vanilla is even better than the chocolate!” That’s my kind of feedback =)
After divvying up the frosting into 4 bowls, I mixed gel food coloring into the icing and tried to match the colors of the hand crafted cake toppers: green, blue, red, and yellow. Red was the toughest since the plain version of the gel tastes the grossest and I had to use a lot of color. There just has to be a better option besides Wilton’s “No taste Red” b/c it still does come up bright enough. I went through a whole container of yucky plain “Red” and all of a “No taste Red” and ended up with a slightly pinkish-red. Maybe it’s time to explore powdered coloring…
I put basic swirls on the little cakes and just stacked them in clamshell containers. I was staring @ 15 very colorful cupcake boxes and wondered how the hell they would all fit in the fridge, along w/all the extra cupcakes, too. I think I spent a good half hour going through all our cold food and condiments, tossing out half-eaten jars of pickled something-or-others that were God knows how old (well, OK not more than 2 years old since we moved in in 2009), cramming plastic take out containers of leftovers in the crisper and deli meat drawers, and stacking smaller cans on top of jars and larger canisters of food. I made use of as much space as I could and stacked things up until I was able to fit all the cupcakes and quart containers of frosting in the fridge. I warned Vin that I basically hid everything and if he needed any food to let me know. And now we know the max amount of cupcakes my refrigerator can handle! =D
I brought them over to my neighbor’s house and helped her put in her hand-crafted cupcake toppers. She ordered these cute custom toppers that had her son’s name on them and pictures of Big Bird, Oscar, Elmo… and she glued them to lollipop sticks and tied ribbon on them. We stuck them in the cupcakes and arranged them on a stand while her son sampled the goods. =) It looked fantastic and I heard it was a fantastic party!
Next week’s project: baby shower cupcakes…
