Cupcakes are everywhere...

I love community education and Chabot College offers a variety of great classes.  On Saturday, Faustino and I had the opportunity to take Cupcake Decorating I.  When I say, opportunity, I mean I wanted to take the class and I convinced Faustino into taking the class with me.

In order to prepare for Saturday's class as we had to take 12 cupcakes each, thus I made 24 lemon cupcakes on Friday night.  I finally took the last 6 out of the oven around 11:15 and went to bed.  Saturday came, after my short run and a shower, we were on our way to Hayward.  We arrived just on time, signed in and gave our $20 each for materials.

During the class, which was only 2 hours long, we learned how to do simple decorations on cupcakes.  And if I do say so myself, I thought mine turned out pretty good.

2 hours, $59/per person, 12 plain lemon cupcakes, materials bag, frosting and accessories and the following is what you get:

The first set of 3 cupcakes decorated were summer themed: a watermelon, a summer sun and a sunflower.

Watermelon, Sun & Sunflower

The next set of 3 were Spring cupcakes and consisted of an Easter Bunny, an Easter basket and a flower. 



Easter Bunny, Easter basket & Flower

The third set of 3 were the "Novelty" cupcakes: Graduation, Pinwheel & a Puppy.


Graduation Cap

Pinwheel & Puppy

And for the final set of 3 we used fondant to make flowery decorated cupcakes. 

 

Pink fondant used to decorate

I have to say the 2 hours was well spent.  The cupcakes were yummy and pretty.  I learned a few decorating tricks.  Hey who knows maybe I'll start my own decorating business (probably not, they didn't come out that great, ha!).  I will be decorating again though...and as always stay tuned for more.

And the creativity starts...Adventures in making Coffee Cake

January 2, 2011 - Adventures in making Coffee Cake

I will start by admitting that I'm not a cook.  A couple of years ago I would have even went so far as to say that I hated cooking.  Besides Faustino is good at cooking so who am I to stand in his way.  But as time would go by he started complaining more and more informing me that he wanted me to try my hand at making dinner.  And since then, I have and I've even improved my cooking skills.

But that is cooking and we're now talking about baking!  I've always liked baking, but was never great at it.  Then some how in the past couple of years I decided to take up baking again here and there.  And by Christmas 2009 I was even confident enough to bake massive amounts of goodies and hand them out as presents to my family (they were awesome by the way).  It was definitely a step up from my thought of never stepping foot into a kitchen to make any kind of food for someone other than myself.

Anyhoo, I had planned on starting 2011 by making Country Living's Crunchy Coffee Cake.  Haha that didn't happen.  I was too tired and of course I needed milk and my kitchen was dry.  Moving forward one day...January 2, 2011.  I rested all day before so I didn't have an excuse to postpone my planned breakfast that I had promised Faustino and Megan.

Everything was going great until I had to start making the crumble that goes on top...Cake Flour?!?  What the hell is cake flour and where do I get it?  Store.  No way, I wasn't going back there, I was in my pjs and I intended to stay that way.  Looking like a raggamuffin and all.  Screw it.  I'm using regular flour.  And you're supposed to cut the butter in the mixture, but that was too much work for me.  I had the mixer out from cake portion so I decided to be lazy and mix in the butter and thought nothing more of it.

Until I laid the topping on the cake and thought that doesn't look right.  Oh well, into bake it goes.  20 minutes later and this is what comes out...

Now I'm not an expert but I know this doesn't look right.  Megan took one look at it and then the recipe and knew that I didn't cut the butter in like I was supposed to.  Whoops.  Well, I guess that's what I get for cutting corners and not following directions: ugly coffee cake.  We ate it anyway, because I had promised coffee cake.  And you know what?  It tasted great.  Maybe next time I'll follow the recipe a little closer and I'll have a better looking meal and thus a better photo op. 



Coffee & Cake :)