Wordless Wednesday: Who says the cupcake craze is over? Not me.

Thursday 13: Cupcakes!

f you look back at yesterday's Wordless Wednesday, you'll see that cupcakes have been on my mind. I made a bunch for a work event, and it reawakened my cupcake love, for sure. In looking around for recipes and ideas, I saw a lot of fun cupcakes, and thought I'd share 13 of my favorites...

1. Check out these Guitar Hero cupcakes. Those would make the teenagers happy, eh? Also from the same site, I saw these periodic table cupcakes (below). While I can't say the execution is up to snuff, I do like the concept. Maybe if I'd had those in junior high, memorizing the periodic table would have been easier?

2. Hungry caterpillar cupcakes, for the toddlers among us...

3. And corn on the cob cupcakes, for the grownups. How fun are those?

 4. Such cute peep cupcakes, and in a rainbow array, too! (I will remember those for next Easter!)

5. I love these orange cupcakes--especially the idea of baking in the orange peel. Clever and yummy!

6. Dahlia cupcakes... I love the colored sugar on the petals! So pretty.

7. Hamburger cupcakes: these would be another hit with the kids, I'm sure.

8. Sunflower cupcakes, so sunny and summery! I saw another recipe that had chocolate-covered sunflower seeds in the middle (rather than the chocolate cereal pictured here), which would be cute and easy as well.

9. In keeping with the current owl obsession that seems to be everywhere, here are some very cute owl cupcakes.

10. I love the dressed-up look of these super-elegant white cupcakes. These would be great for a wedding.

11. Apple cupcakes for teacher appreciation week. (Or, to make the whole "an apple a day keeps the doctor away" concept that much easier to swallow!)

12. Black Forest cupcakes from our friend Martha Stewart. (I'm sure it's no surprise to you, but she has a LOT of great cupcakes on her site.)

13. And how incomplete would this list be without rainbow cupcakes?

I think I'm ready for some of those orange cupcakes, soon. Which one is your favorite?

For more Thursday 13s, go here.

Cancer-fighting cupcakes!

ear friend Jen had her seventh chemo treatment for lymphoma on Tuesday and I was honored to be her chemo buddy for the day. Well, her husband Victor always comes along, and another friend, Kimberly, popped by too, so really it's more like being part of her chemo crowd. Which is very cool. She's got heaps of support and love coming at her (her little iPhone positively buzzed with texts and calls and tweets of love throughout the day!), which is bound to send that awful tumor running, don't you think?

Part of Jen's chemo "process" has been the belief that Pop Rocks cure cancer. Which makes total sense, right? I could have told you that as a seven-year-old with my tongue out and orange Pop Rocks bouncing around in my mouth! So every chemo day, Pop Rocks play a big role...

But for me, planning my trip to Portland, the critical question was: What to take to chemo? I mean, aside from trashy magazines. Well, my need for cupcakes being what it is, and my love for all things rainbow (because it's all abut me, right?)... and you have chemo cupcakes. Where do the Pop Rocks figure in? ON TOP. Yep, pretty cool.

Cupcakes ready to take a ride to Portland. Pre-Pop Rocks application... too much sogginess and the pop is gone. Can't have that.

I found this rad cupcake carrier online. You should have seen how jealous every other patient (nurses too) were in the chemo room. They were salivating over Jen's cupcakes. (It's kinda retro and when everyone who admired it was over the age of 60, I was a wee bit worried. But Jen liked it too. At least, that's what she told me!)

Here's a picture just prior to eating. PopRocks complete the cupcake! They still do their popping thing, and combined with the yumminess of the cupcake... just great.

And here I am doing a "pole dance" for Jen. She issued a challenge a while back on her blog to her readers, calling for pole dancing pictures as entertainment for her. I had conveniently been putting that off, what with my lack of pole-dancing skills. Here I have been coached (seriously, I needed coaching to get my leg around a pole. What's up with that?!) by Jen and fellow chemo-buddy Kimberly. I have now done my part in the pole department.

Thanks for letting me be a part of your day, dear friend. Here's to the continued shrinkage of that darn tumor, and to the day when we can have rainbow cupcakes to celebrate your cancer-free status.

Lemon meringue cupcakes become reality!

I posted a lemon meringue cupcake recipe in Future Files a week or two ago, with full intention of making these for more than just the three of us! As the Goerlitz Jr.s were coming over for Mother's Day weekend, it seemed a great opportunity to give these a whirl. And since baking gluten-free means Lucy gets to eat along, I thought it would be a good opportunity to break out some gluten-free baking mixes I've seen around, too.

I got the Namaste brand vanilla cake mix, and then lemoned it up--instead of the water it called for in the recipe, I just added fresh sqeezed lemon juice. The cakes themselves smelled lemony as I was spooning them into the cupcake papers, so I was pretty confident it would work out OK.

Once those were made and the lemon curd as well, it was just a matter of waiting for Master Apprentice Maizy to show up and assist in the meringue making and assembly. Saturday morning we busted out the egg whites and made the cute meringue toppings in no time.

I experimented with a new lemon curd recipe, which you can find here: A Foolproof Way to Make Lucious, Light Lemon Curd. It turned out really well, especially great considering that I used a non-dairy, non-soy shortening to use as the fat replacement for butter, by Spectrum. It looked and acted a lot like Crisco.

The meringue recipe was pretty basic: I pretty much followed the one in the original recipe, but of course thought to myself, "There's no way only 4 egg whites [I was already doubling from the original recipe!] will make enough meringue," and in true Sher-fashion I doubled it (again!), only to have twice as much meringue as needed. (Which did lead to a serendipitous brunch pavlova for Sunday, so there. See Sunday brunch post to follow.)

Once the meringues baked up, it was a happy little project to put the curd on the cupcake and top it all off with a little meringue hat. Very cute. They got mixed reviews from the crowd; the cupcakes themselves were a little dense for the adults, and the lemon curd was a little intense for the kids. But they are definitely worth keeping around as a fun dessert, and I'll probably try them again without the gluten free constraint and see how that goes.

Future files: Lemon meringue cupcakes

In the not-so-distant future (that is, by next weekend when relatives are visiting!), these babies are coming out to play. Seth will be on cloud nine. I will post that happiness that will be mine.

Future files: Cookie dough cupcakes

Not everything I see and drool over can I make Right This Minute. Not only do I not have the time and energy for that, I also don't have the metabolism! So I dreamt up a new category for this here blog o' mine and decided to call it "Future Files." In all my little scourings of the web I see countless little nuggets to taste and try over time... this will be my method of filing them away to try later. I swear I will try them later, and then post again, my version.

This one just jumped out at me this last week from Serious Eats. I have always been a sucker for cookie dough (ask my mother who used to threaten to make me eat a whole batch. I just prayed she'd follow through on that!), and though I don't go in so much for the cookie dough ice cream that was all the rage a few years back (and probably still is), I AM a self-professed cupcake nut, so this combo looks just too good to pass up. I ran it by the young taste-tester this morning and he gave it the big thumbs up, so it will definitely come out of the "future" and into the present, soon!

This version is from a "mix" recipe, which I'm not generally a big fan or proponent of. So when I do make these, it will be a from-scratch scenario. Yum. I think I need to go find some lunch...

Build a little cupcake in your soul

So, things have been happening these past few weeks, though you wouldn't know it from the blog. Too busy or too sick to post, but never to busy to cook and bake and make cupcakes. More postings to come over the weekend, but I thought I'd start with the easy stuff--the cupcake baby shower at work last week.

There's no recipe for this one, since I basically did a Sandra Lee semi-homemade moment and amped up some cake mixes. This is truly just a photo opportunity. And even those I am borrowing--I forgot my camera at home so got these from the work files. I really need to remember my camera. All those years of events, and it's one of my most consistent "doh!" moments.... camera, what camera?

I was fairly happy with how they turned out. I'm not a cake decorator, but I like to pretend. One day I might actually take a class!

The blue giant cupcake I called my Smurf house; I just wanted to put a little door on the side and move in!