Malted cupcakes and a special anniversary cake

This week was about celebrating my mom. She has been clean and sober for 26 years! That's pretty impressive, I think. So her girlfriends wanted to have a party and guess who she volunteered to make the cake? Yup.

In addition to that, my husband's office had an open house that he wanted me to make cupcakes for. Busy week when you factor in the day job, school and 3 year old! But still, if I didn't enjoy it, I wouldn't do it. I decided to take advantage of the cupcake order as an excuse to try out a new flavor - chocolate malted. I actually chose it for several reasons - it's been requested, we had lots of leftover Whoppers from Halloween, and (most importantly) it's one of my mom's favorite flavors. Next to licorice which I refuse to make because it's gross.

So, I kept it pretty simple for these cupcakes, I found a great cake recipe on the Food Network website but it wasn't "malted" enough for me so instead of the recommended frosting, I made a malted buttercream. I had malted bits I found a while back at the cake shop, but you could easily make them by mashing up some malted candies. I think it would have been better to add them to the cake as they made the icing look like nutty poop (sorry if that's a gross thought, but it's true!) and they blocked my piping tip which made frosting very difficult.

Malted Buttercream

2 sticks butter, room temperature                                   1/2 cup malted milk powder

1 tsp Vanilla extract                                                        2.5-4 cups powdered sugar

Blend butter and vanilla together until smooth. Add malted powder. Gradually add powdered sugar until frosting is desired consistancy.

They went over pretty well, but who doesn't like chocolate? No one I know, that's for sure! Here's what they looked like nestled in the box with all their cupcake friends. One big happy sugar family!

Like I said, I also made a cake for my mom's party. I had this spray on color that I had bought a while back and was aching to use up before it went bad. So I decided to make plain fondant and spray it green. It worked great, but when I added the flowers and letters, it was impossible to moisten it enough without ruining the green. Yeah, I learned it the hard way. Luckily, the only pictures I have are from the camera phone, so you can't tell! I'm going to call that another lesson learned the hard way. That's what the Cake Chemist project is all about after all.

So, after all this baking for others, I was offered a job making Christmas baskets for the company and I'm making lots and lots of cupcakes next week for my laboratory's bake sale to raise money for our Adopt-A-Family. If you happen to be in Dayton Children's Hospital next Tuesday November 16th, stop in for some tasty treats. Otherwise, check back in a week for an update on how it went. I plan on trying out some more vegan cupcakes and some sugar-free treats of some sort. Also maybe I'll start on Christmas flavors....we'll just have to see what inspires me at the grocery store this weekend!