Love is...baking a bazillion cupcakes

One of my best friends is an amazing baker.  That doesn't even do her justice, beyond baking she is an artist who designs beautiful cakes!  Unfortunately for me she lives like five hours away.  So when I needed a cake for my birthday, it was going to be pretty tricky for her to get here...especially for a Friday party.  With all of her support and her encouraging words, we decided we might be able to make a cake. 

Now, I was not about to make my own cake, but Jason being so inspired by the show Ace of Cakes thought he could. We set out for Michael's.  Have you priced cake baking supplies lately? Like for a tiered cake with fondant? If you have ever wondered why cakes are sometimes expensive like I have, you suddenly become very appreciative when you see the cost of the supplies. When I say supplies I mean everything from the cake pans to fondant.  It is certainly an investment.  If you are just planning on making one fancy cake, you are probably much better off to hire a qualified baker or investing time in figuring out how to make your own fondant.  I imagine making your own fondant is quite difficult though.  Anyway, as we looked over the supplies and pondered how much to spend or what to do, I saw some cute cupcakes. 

In a neighboring town there is a cupcake bakery that is pretty good. They have fabulous flavors like peach cobbler and vanilla bean.  I also realized that at work we had tons of cupcake stands I could borrow.  We decided to do a few different flavors of cupcakes with different toppings.  I didn't want a plain cake with icing...if I did, I would've just had King Soopers make me one.  Besides, picking a few flavors of cupcakes and toppers would be fun! Immediately, I found some guitars and stars that reminded me of 80's rock. Remember, I said that my birthday party was going to be an 80's theme.  We also found some Transformer icing toppers that looked like they were the original logos. I knew I wanted a third topping so each flavor could have a different top.  We went all over town, but found nothing.  It struck me to make my own topper! We decided to purchase sugar cookie dough (really, there are only so many hours in a day) and cut it to look like Pac Man.   We also bought neon food coloring for our frosting and some black icing.  We planned to make cupcakes on Thursday night for my Friday birthday.  I had my Pampered Chef party on Wednesday night.  I looked at my planner and realized I had to travel out of town on Thursday night! This meant I either needed to order a cake or my dear, sweet, loving husband had to do a majority of the work on his own.

Since he was so inspired by Ace of Cakes to take on a cake, he thought he'd be able to bake the cupcakes.  I picked out the flavors, printed the recipes, and made a long list of ingredients.  He checked the pantry to see what we had in stock and what he needed to purchase.  While I was out of town on Thursday he baked chocolate mint cupcakes with a mint butter cream frosting, a banana cupcake with peanut butter butter cream frosting, and peach cobbler cupcakes with a brown sugar cream cheese frosting.  I came home to a lovely smelling house and an exhausted husband!   I helped him ice some of the cupcakes and made a fourth flavor on Friday afternoon.  I used the extra brown sugar cream cheese frosting to frost my red velvet cup cakes.  These were from a box mix, all the other cup cakes were made from scratch.

I think they turned out pretty good. Especially, since this was really the husbands first baking adventure. He did excellent!! See for yourself below...