Are you a fan of delicious flavor?

These cupcakes are a nod to my favorite television show, Psych.  The title of this post is a recurring line in the show and relates directly to today's flavor choice - pineapple.  There is at least one pineapple hidden in every show (sometimes well-hidden and sometimes obvious) and the network even has "Find the Pineapple" sweepstakes each week. 

http://www.usanetwork.com/series/psych/

These cupcakes are called "Pineapple Princess", after a song by Annette Funicello, released in the summer of 1960, on the album, "Hawaiiannette".  It was also in Disney's "Lilo and Stitch 2".  It's one of those songs that just gets stuck in your head.


Annette Funicello - "Pineapple Princess"

These are golden yellow cupcakes with crushed pineapple folded into the batter.  They are very moist and somewhat dense, but they are still tender.  The frosting is Pineapple Mascarpone Cream Cheese.  Each cupcake is topped with a candied pineapple tidbit.

 

The frosting is very susceptible to heat, so it appears a bit gooey after setting at room temperature for a bit.  The other cupcakes were refrigerated to avoid this.  There is no filling in the cupcakes.  The frosting just sort of oozed downward with the knife during cutting.  All in all, these were pretty tasty. 

Cupcakes for a Stay-at-Home Dad

These cupcakes were made for a friend who was quitting his job to become a stay-at-home dad.  He even took on home-schooling.  (That's courageous in my book, because I would never have dreamed of trying it!)  These were vanilla cupcakes with buttercream frosting.

These are some of my earliest cupcakes, so try not to judge me too harshly.  They aren't my best work, but there was a lot of time and effort put into them.  From a creative standpoint, I was pleased.

There were remote controls (very primitive ones, with only volume and channel arrow buttons, a red power button, and the name of our local cable provider).  The blue ones represented the family swimming pool.  Tiny green tadpoles swim in the blue water (because they had an infestation of tadpoles the summer before this) among life preservers.

The remotes were made on the back side of miniature Hershey's Chocolate Bars; the tadpoles were made from Starburst Fruit Chews; and the life preservers were actually Peach Rings.

The top two rows you see on the right are "Honey Do" lists, flip flop shoes, sunglasses, "Dad's Taxi" signs, grocery lists, etc.  Fruit Roll-Ups were used for the lists and the sunglasses lenses.  Starburst Fruit Chews were used for the flip flops and sunglasses.

The bottom row was personalized cupcakes for the dad and kids.  The afternoon nap is depicted.  (The mom didn't get a personalized cupcake, because she would not be napping and would be at work.)  The dad is holding a cookbook.  The son is wide-awake because he has been reading a book of ghost stories.  The next two are daughters and they are sleeping soundly with their teddy bears.  The baby has a pacifier.

Marshmallow halves were used for the pillows and bodies.  Vanilla Wafers made the heads; Fruit Roll-Ups were used for blankets and books; miniature Teddy Grahams were used for the teddy bears.  Everything else was frosting and food coloring.

I understand the kids really enjoyed their personal cupcakes.  I hope that's true, because I had a lot of fun creating these.

Brownies and Pixies

 

Last week I wanted to bake something but didn't have much time, due to so many long hours at work.  The kiddos on my caseload (or "pixies" in this case) were pretty demanding last week and the weather wasn't cooperating very well, either.  I rummaged around the kitchen and pulled out the only box of brownie mix I had - a box of Betty Crocker Deluxe Brownie Mix with Hershey's Chocolate and Walnuts.  I decided to whip up a batch and put them in a 9" x 13" pan, so that they would be the thin chewy type, like those in the photograph. I'm not a big fan of cake-type brownies.  (That's a stock photo above and it shows brownies with pecans, not walnuts, but I could only stand to look at so many photos of brownies without developing a craving for another batch!  I failed to take any photographs of the brownies I baked.) 

At any rate, the box mix yielded 20 brownies.  I didn't put frosting on them, because I am a brownie purist.  I think frosting detracts from the fudgey goodness.  The most I ever add to my brownies is a dusting of powdered sugar, but these brownies were naked - no frosting; no powdered sugar; just chocolate and walnut in a delicious marriage of flavor.

"Pretty Please with a Cherry on Top?"

I developed this recipe after being unable to find a recipe for cherry cupcakes that sounded good to me.  I wanted something simple and tasty.  I was very pleased with this result.  I think I will coat the "dropped" cherries with flour next time in an attempt to suspend them in the center of the cupcake instead of having them drop to the bottom.  Even though the cherries dropped, they added a nice touch to the cupcakes.

I used a new recipe for "Special Buttercream Frosting" that I found on www.allrecipes.com, but I modified that, too.  Instead of all shortening, I used half shortening and half butter and increased the amount of whipping cream.

The reviews were pretty spectacular, so I think this cupcake recipe is a keeper! 

(These cupcakes were made for a little girl on my caseload.  She just turned four and was recently reunited with her family, so I took three cupcakes to her house when I did my monthly visit.  They seemed to appreciate it.)

Pie are Round?

In Math class we learned that "Pi are square".  In Home Economics, we learned that "Pie are round".  In this case, "Pie are rectangular".  Most people that saw this pie thought it was a cobbler based upon shape alone.  They didn't seem to like pie in a non-traditional shape, although the taste was the same.  Odd...

I got this pie pan from www.kitchenkrafts.com.  I like that it has diagonal wedge guides in the bottom of the pan, but I think they are set too far apart.  It is set to cut 6 large slices of pie.  I would probably cut this into 8 slices.  I also like the fact that because of the unique pan design, you only have one side of exposed filling at any one time.  However, if you normally use a pie gate, it won't work with this pan.

This is an apricot pie with a sugar-laden lattice crust.  It was yummy!

Sunflower Cupcakes

These were sunflower cupcakes made for work.  Chocolate and white cupcakes were the base.  Oreos serve as the centers of the flowers, buttercream frosting makes the grass and flower petals, and Nabisco Honey Graham Bees pollinate each cupcake.  The reason some of the sunflowers are blue (an impossible color for a sunflower) is simply that I ran out of yellow.  

A Life in Cupcakes

(NOTE:  This post has been slightly modified for posting to www.iheartfaces.blogspot.com.)

These Red Velvet cupcakes with Fluffy White frosting were made for my mother's 80th birthday last year.  I just used a boxed cake mix and canned frosting from Duncan Hines.  The true story is in the decorations.  (I also made Pistachio Almond Fudge cupcakes - the cake part from a mix and the frosting from scratch! - for the same party and blogged about them recently.  They can be seen in the first photo here.  The table in the first photo is sprinkled with confetti, not food stains.)

I thought it would be easy to come up with designs describing my mother's life in cupcakes.  I was wrong.  There was just too many things - some lent themselves well to a cupcake tableau, but many did not.  There was also a time issue.  So I settled for cotton bolls, Scrabble tiles, basketballs, marbles, music notes, dominoes, and yes, a few obscure frying pans (black fondant with blue liquid gel inside).  Please allow me to explain...

When my mother, Joan (pronounced JoAnn), was a young girl, her family worked the cotton fields.  Now I hoed peanuts as a teenager, but that was by choice and I only did it one summer.  My mother's entire family planted, hoed, chopped, and picked cotton - even the toddlers - and they did it year after year.  This is something I really have a hard time imagining, but I respect the work ethic that all of the children pitched in with little to no complaints.  The cotton bolls are made from semi-sweet chocolate, which was shaped by ladling melted chocolate into plastic Easter eggs.  When it was hardened, the eggs were bent to remove the "bolls".  The cotton was white cotton candy, which had to be special ordered from New Jersey.  The shipping was actually more than the cost of the cotton candy!  I tried to find white cotton candy locally, but was unsuccessful.  (However, big kudos to The Corn Popper of Tulsa for trying and for giving me what they made for free!) 

The others are mostly self-explanatory:

My mother played marbles as a child and was pretty good at the game;

Dominoes were a staple game in her family and she still loves Moon and regular dominoes.

My mother played basketball in high school - back when girls still played 6-on-6 half-court ball and could only dribble the ball one time before passing it - and she was quite good.

My mother loves music in most forms and has always had a lovely singing voice.  She has played the organ for her church for over 50 years and often sang at church and home.

Now for the obscure frying pan - it's not for the reason you may think.  While my mother is a very good cook, it has nothing to do with cooking, but is a reference to music (sort of).  When my mother was young, her father would entertain his children by making up rhymes about each one and singing them to the kids, along with "Eefin' & Oofin'" or skat.  My mother's rhyme was:

"I know a little girl,

Her name is Joan,

She washed her feet

in the frying pan!"

All of the kids thought this was very funny, as did Granddaddy and Grandmother.  I can still remember hearing him sing it to my sisters and me when we were small. 

So there you have it - my mother's life, on a very small scale, in cupcakes.

: )