Spring Cupcakes

This is a fun spring project inspired by Hello Cupcake.  It's perfect for kids- even your little ones can do this with an adult handy to cut the marshmallow. It is an easy project, with simple ingredients. Make and frost your favorite cup cakes, and grab some marshmallows and sprinkles. With a scissor, slice large marshmallows horizontally in five slices and coat the sticky sides in the colored sugar. Place slices, slightly overlapping, around the edge of the cupcake. For the sunflowers, fill the center of the cupcake with dark brown jimmies.

 For the daisies we used Dots, cut in half horizontally and squished flat for the center. You can use any color combination of candies, sugars, and jimmies to make many different spring flowers!

The butterflies were a bit more complicated. They are also from Hello Cupcake and are made with candy melts. 

Draw an antenna and a pair wings on paper, place paper on a baking sheet and cover with baking parchment. Melt candy melts in plastic frosting bottles, or zip lock bags. On your parchment, first outline the wings in one color then fill the center with a contrasting color, rap the pan on a hard surface to smooth the candy melts, and using a tooth pick, drag and swirl some of the edge color with the center color. Let set until hardened.  Assemble your butterflies on top of your frosted cupcakes. Place wings in frosting at angles pipe some candy melt dots between them (or use round candy) for the body and add your antenna.

Sounds easy. It is if...your kitchen is warm enough so the candy melts stay liquid for a few minutes. Our kitchen was very cold the day we made these butterflies, and when the liquid candy melts hit the parchment on the cold cookie sheet they hardened almost immediately, and the whole thing became very frustrating. Our solution: once the wings were piped, we slid the pan in the a warm oven for a minute to soften the candy melts. Then proceed with rapping and swirling. Success!

Cupcake Fun

Come on in and have a birthday cupcake!  This month Mimi's Kitchen is one year old.  One year ago, I didn't even know that blogs existed. My neighbor Mrs. M sent me an email about a Martha Stewart show on cake pops. I was fascinated. One thing lead to another and I ended up at the Daring Bakers. I thought what a fun way to spend time with my children, who all enjoy baking and cooking.

You can join The Daring Bakers without a blog, but that link wasn't working and I wanted to join ( I can be some what impatient), so I clicked on the blog link and the next thing I knew I had created Mimi's Kitchen. Now just what is a food blog? For me, this blog is my cookbook to my children. For years, every time I made something my children liked they would say, Mimi put that in your cookbook, so now I have.

  I'm usually a pretty a shy person, so when I got my very first comment from Ingrid  (The 3 B's Baseball, Baking & Books) I was excited that someone noticed me. Then one day Ozoz  (The Kitchen Butterfly) asked me a question that made me laugh. So, I began to make my own comments, and ask questions of other bloggers when I wanted to know about an ingredient or method.

I never realized just how many people love to cook and bake for fun. I now know that my large collection of cookbooks, cooking magazines and kitchen gadgets is not abnormal and that other people also buy cake pans because they are just too cute to pass up.  

I thought these flower cupcakes were the perfect way to celebrate my blog's summer birthday. To make these fun cup cakes from What's New Cupcake, just bake up a batch of your favorite cupcakes and frost them in what ever frosting you like. I found that white frosting worked best with the white marshmallows that are used for decoration. Each cupcake takes about 22 miniature marshmallows. Snip them in half on the diagonal and drop into a bowl of colored sugar. I also discovered that I needed to roll back the cut edges of the marshmallows so more sugar would adhere to the cut surface. Starting at the outside edge place marshmallow in concentric circles over the top of the frosted cupcake. I filled the center with yellow jimmies. You could also use a Skittles or M&M's. These were really easy to do and would be a fun project for children (an adult might need to cut the marshmallows)

I'm still learning the ins and outs of blogging.  Baking is easy, writing is not and photography is a whole new skill set. Hopefully, over time, I will improve my content, my comments and my photos.

Thank You, all for making my first year in Mimi's Kitchen so much fun. I have enjoyed meeting, baking and traveling along with you. 

I'm sending these to the Foodie Friday party at Designs by Gollum