These are super easy and adorable cupcakes to make for your Mom on Mother’s day!
Jelly Bean Flower Pot Cupcakes
April 25, 2015 by
Candy Stuffed Peanut Butter Cupcakes
April 19, 2015 by
This is a recipe for peanut butter lovers only! Hello?? Pick me! Pick me! These are the most peanut-y delights that I have made. They consist of a peanut butter cake base, filled with peanut butter candies, and topped with peanut butter buttercream! Oh heavens.
Candy Nacho Cupcakes
April 17, 2015 by
I’m becoming obsessed with food that looks like other food- specifically cupcakes and cake that look like savory food! I even took all of our recipes that are on YouTube and made a special playlist for them. You can watch it here.
Starbucks Peppermint Mocha Cupcakes
December 10, 2014 by
As you probably know by now, I have a slight additction to Starbucks drinks. In the fall, I love me a PSL, and when the winter time hits, it’s either a Peppermint Mocha Light, or a Gingerbread Latte, half sweet, non-fat, no whip. Yep, I’m that girl. Slightly high maintenance, but since I’m paying $5 a drink, I feel I’m entitled to a bit of choosiness.
Back in September, I made a Pumpkin Spice Latte drink into a cupcake (see it here), and our viewers really seemed to enjoy that, and so many people requested that I do another cupcake. Since the peppermint mocha seemed to be popular, and a drink that I already enjoyed, I decided to make that!
The chocolate and peppermint combination in this treat is perfect for any holiday celebration you might be attending. Bring cupcakes to a Christmas event can be a nice change from the normal assortment of cookies trays that are found in abundance around this time of year.
The swirl affect of the icing looks super hard, but it’s actually really easy! In simple terms, all I do to create that effect is to “stripe” the bag with gel paste prior to putting the white buttercream into the piping bag. I have shown viewers how to do that before when I made a Skittles cupcake, and I will also use it again in a video up loading this weekend!
I hope you enjoy this tutorial, have a very Merry Christmas!
Grinch Christmas Cupcakes (Candy Melt Drawing)
December 6, 2014 by
Next to National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, and Love Actually, How the Grinch Stole Christmas is up near the top of my favourite Christmas movies. I’ve definitely been watching my share of Christmas movies already this year, as I decorate and think up new cake ideas. It helps put me in the mood. It’s for research people!
I love the Grinch book more than the movie. If you’re a frequent reader of this blog, you might have heard that statement a couple of posts ago in regards to Hunger Games! It’s the teacher in me. I prefer the books. Dr Seuss had a magical mind, and he was able to put it into the pages of many books for us to read. He is the creator of the original Grinch story if you didn’t know that the Grinch existed before Jim Carrey brought him to life in the movie.
Making these Grinch toppers is super simple. You only have to be good at tracing! Who can’t trace something?!?! Everyone can! The link to the download is posted below in the recipe area.
I knew I was going to be making these cupcake toppers this year, as they were on my list from last year, so I ordered the lime green melting wafers from Wilton a couple of months ago. You might even be lucky and able to find them on clearance in the Halloween section of a craft store! I don’t have any stores like that where I live, so I had to be planned.
For the other chocolates, I use Merckens melting wafers that I buy from the store Bulk Barn in Canada. True chocolate purists will say that it is not actually chocolate, and technically they would be right, but for a project like this, there is no point in tempering and colouring pure chocolate. That would add a ton of work, and time to the idea. If you’ve got more time than me, by all means, I’d love to see you do it, and I would be so proud of you.
The heart sprinkles were an addition that I thought completed the cupcakes. But if you don’t like them, you don’t have to add them. I get asked that type of question in the comments on YouTube all the time- if it’s a decorating element, you can decorated however you want, but, if it’s a recipe element, you need to follow the directions to be successful.
Merry Christmas, I hope you enjoy these cupcakes!
Devil’s Food Cake Halloween Cupcakes
October 19, 2014 by
I usually put my blog posts up when the video goes live in the mornings, but Paul and I have been fortunate enough to have spent the last four days in Toronto hanging out (and working) at Buffer Festival! Which means the Paul end of things (the video) was scheduled and ready to go before we even left, and the Jenn end of things (the blog post) was not. I apologize to those of you who wait to hear my insightful additions to our current video in the form of the blog. Thanks for that Mom. Actually, I don’t even think she reads it! She’s really great at sharing on Facebook though 🙂
The last couple days, and months, and pretty much year have been incredible ones for Paul and I. We are incredibly fortunate to have dream jobs as creators on YouTube. Neither of us had been to Toronto before, and I love it here! I love the shopping, I love the culture and I love that there is any kind of food you could imagine here! We had the most amazing Thai food right behind our hotel our first night here. I haven’t seen a cupcake though. It’s been a nice break from them. We attended the Buffer Festival Industry day on Thursday and set up a booth to serve our Pumpkin Spice Latte cupcakes. Make sure you check us out on Facebook and Instagram for pictures of all the fun things we did that day. On Friday we attended a couple of screenings; Rhett and Link, and Epic Meal Time. Rhett and Link seem like incredibly nice guys, and their screening was great to sit through. They showed the audience the evolution of their channel(s) and we even got to watch Monday’s upload ahead of time! It’s a great one! The EMT screening was a showing of a couple of episodes of their new TV series, Epic Meal Empire. It was great to see those guys in person as well, and I even met Harley on the street . . . and totally fan girled on him. I was supposed to be professional, but that didn’t happen! I’ve watched him for so long, that I was just honored to be able to talk to him. Last night we finished the night off with a creator party at the pop-up YouTube Space TO, and had a blast. Google always treats us incredibly well. At the party, we were in the company of amazingly talented people . . . to name drop unabashedly, my friends Harley, Rhett, Link, and Shay Carl. There were soooooo many others that I knew were amazing creators, but being so busy, I don’t have a lot of time to consume my own medium! This morning, with very little sleep, we headed off to YTSTO again, for a couple of workshops. One on Creator Development, which we have had before, but it’s always good to have a recap and check in, and then another presentation from Rhett and Link. They have created themselves quite the empire and they have so many exciting things in store- including a new morning show with women!
Anyway, that’s the long winded reason why my blog post is late. “Jenn,” you ask, “can’t you schedule your blog posts like Paul schedules the videos?” Yes, I can. But I can’t figure out our server’s time zone!
I’ve been wanting to do these devil cupcakes since last October. I wanted to do them last year, but we ran out of time. I figure waiting a year to see if I really like an idea is probably a good thing. If I still really liked it, then I would definitely make it. I don’t have any regrets when it comes to cake videos we’ve uploaded, but there are some ideas that looking back, I know I could have done them better. When I’m developing an idea/recipe, I want to make it as fabulous as possible. So when thinking about what would go well with a devil cupcake, devil’s food cake was the obvious choice!
The difficulty for this recipe came when attempting to dip the cupcakes. If you do not place them in the fridge, the buttercream is likely to plop off and fall directly into your red melted chocolate. Make sure it’s solidly set on the cupcake before dipping, or you’ll ruin your red chocolate like I did while practicing!
If you’re still with me and reading, thanks again Mom, I won’t take up anymore of your time . . . so here is the super simple video for how to make your own Devil Cupcakes.
How to Make Edible Fake Blood & Bloody Halloween Cupcakes
October 15, 2014 by
This idea is gross. There’s no way around that. If you don’t want to think about squeamish things, don’t keep reading! But, if you need something for Halloween that is disgusting, then this is perfect for you!
In this tutorial, I show you how to make edible BLOOD! If blood covered cupcakes doesn’t revolt you enough, then definitely add our Heart and Brain Cupcakes to your dessert buffet. The combo of the two cupcakes is sure to scare and frighten people away from eating them! Who needs a diet when you serve bloody, heart and brain cupcakes?!?
To make the edible blood, all you need is corn syrup, chocolate sauce and red gel paste. You can get away without the chocolate sauce, but it adds a bit of flavour to the mixture, rather than the pure sugar rush of just using the corn syrup. Don’t worry, you’ll still get a sugar rush from this combination, it will just taste better! Also, the chocolate tames down the brightness of the red gel paste, which makes for a more realistic blood colour. I don’t have a ton of experience when it comes to blood, but I do know that it’s not fluorescent red when it comes out of my mishaps. Adding a small amount of chocolate helps with that.
If you want to add an additional element of gore factor, fill the middle of the cupcakes with a bright red cherry filling that will burst out when you first bite into the cupcake. I’m sure that will be gross enough for the goriest, gore lover! Also, teaming these cupcakes up with “broken” fingers, and “blood” filled syringes, like we have in the final shot of the video, will help make for the perfect Halloween scene. If you can handle it, that is!
We have lots of other Halloween ideas up on our YouTube channel, so make sure you check out our Halloween playlist!
Skittles Cupcakes with Rainbow Icing
September 13, 2014 by
My kitchen counters have been covered with bags and bags of Skittles for many weeks now. I’ve been working on an upcoming special video with a fellow YouTuber involving Skittles, but that video is not set to go up until next week. I didn’t take the bags of Skittles off the counter after I filmed that video, as I knew I had to make more than ONE Skittles recipe!
So while I wait to show you the original idea for a Skittles recipe, I present to you a Skittles Cupcake recipe! For this recipe I start out with a basic vanilla cake batter and add in whole Skittles. You could also chop the Skittles up into smaller pieces, and that would work for this recipe too, basically it just depends on how much chewiness you want to add to your cupcake. The Skittles flavour is subtle, but you can definitely “taste the rainbow”! Ha, ha, ha . . . I’ve been waiting to use that line.
The rainbow icing is a beautiful way to decorate any flavour of cupcake. I thought the bright, vibrancy of the buttercream would pair perfectly with Skittles, because, as I mentioned already, the Skittles slogan is “Taste the Rainbow.” Striping the bag is the easiest way to achieve this effect. It is simple, and produces a beautiful, rainbow topping. Adding a couple of Skittles to the top for decoration, completes the Skittles theme of the cupcakes.
