Cupcake Tower!!!

I have been inundated with emails about my tower, peeps are just waiting with bated breath to find out what happened. Just kidding, I've just gotten one blog comment from my friend Katharine.

The story is I made about 90 cupcakes for a friend's birthday party a few weeks ago. It was a much bigger effort than I anticipated. And, not everything went smoothly. The two main recipes, vanilla and chocolate cupcakes, literally flopped. I think it was because I used my KitchenAid Mixer to mix in the dry ingredients which over-beat them, because many of the cupcakes were both burnt around the edges and totally sunk in the middle. In the end, I threw out a bunch and frosted the rest to hide the imperfections. I won't recommend either`of those recipes for now. I will recommend the third recipe I made: coffee cupcakes!!! I used Chockylit's Vietnamese Coffee Cupcakes. This recipe is awesome!! I did not make the pudding/filling or the whip cream, but instead I frosted some with the Chocolate Ganache Frosting (found half-way down the linked page, my new favorite chocolate frosting) and some with cream cheese frosting. I also did not make real Vietnamese coffee, but rather just brewed regular 'ol Folgers with double the coffee. Seriously, these were so good.

Icing the cupcakes was my favorite part. I used some diferent piping tips, colors, and homemade gumpaste flowers in a white/brown/teal palette. I also made some mini cakes and some larger ones. Peeps really digged the mini's, probably because it feels less like you're pigging out, even if you eat 5 of them : )

Mini chocolate with chocolate ganache frosting.

Chocolate with buttercream frosting

Aren't they so cute?? There was one guy at the party that was just oggling them all night. Kind of weird actually. Would I do it again? Maybe. But if I do, I will definitely test the recipes out ahead of time. : )