This is THE Last Birthday I'll Do

...in a while. I MEAN it this time!
After the third and last birthday I did, my husband, Alec advised that I should just focus on cupcake recipes, to abstain from any more birthdays until I've perfected my products. That's the only way to get my business started.
With two weeks notice, Julia from my playgroup asked me to do cupcakes for her son, Ben's first birthday. How can I resist? However, I already had a packed June calendar. I decided to try to make the job easy on myself so I put conditions on the order - only one flavor and from only a select choice of flavors - mainly ones that were straight-forward to make. She chose lemon cupcake with cream cheese frosting, a flavor that in my opinion is one of my best. Lemon is refreshing and a *safe* flavor, that no one dislikes, and you don't feel stuffed after eating it.
I tried to learn from my past cupcake orders, which always take longer than I expected where I'm working until midnight. This time, I tried to do as many steps ahead of time, from assembling the cupcake boxes to putting sauce in the squeeze bottles, doing fondant cut-outs plus extra as back up, designing multiple versions of the birthday boy's cupcake.
I started assembly at 7:00pm and finished in record time: 9:30pm.
Julia didn't ask for it, but I threw in a drizzle of lemon curd on top of the cream cheese frosting to give it that burst of lemon flavor. Lemon curd is just so yummy, you can almost eat it straight.
Some tricks I learned: 1) chill the cream cheese frosting in the freezer for 10 min allowing it to hold its shape better when spreading. 2) always have backup - my rule is 10% extra cupcakes and garnish 3) as you finish, spreading the frosting put each cupcake in the frig on the box's cardboard base - for easy transfer into the box 4) Don't make design judgments when you're tired - as the evening progressed, my standards decline progressively - each mistake becomes acceptable.
Even though, I made several designs of the birthday boy's cupcake, the end result didn't turn out like the drawing. I wasn't satisfied, but it was late and i decided it was "good enough". Sure enough, the next morning, I realized that it was not good enough and redid the cupcake in a different design. I decided to line the border with white sprinkles to give it a cleaner look, plus it serves as a "bumper" in case something touches the edge - messing up its smooth surface. The "BEN" inscription was not my best plus I was not careful enough to leave enough space, so the last "N" was squished. For my second version, I lightened the frosting to give a lighter and finer pipability (not sure if that's a word). This time I practiced on the side and sized it up against the face of the cupcake. I know I seem to rely on sparkly sprinkles too much, but I thought some yellow sparklies would give the design more yellow to balance with the amount of green and give it a touch of fanciness.
Check out the two versions of the birthday boy's cupcake: the first was "good enough" and the second is the better one.

Pumpkin Cupcake - Take 4!

It took four tries to get the pumpkin cupcake just right. The recipe is based on the one on Martha Stewart's website. Her recipe resulted in a dense cupcake - closer to pumpkin bread than to a cupcake. In take 2, I used cake flour instead of all-purpose flour, which makes the cake lighter. Cake flour also provides further allowance against overmixing which creates additional gluten causing toughness/chewiness in the cake. Take 2's crumb was smaller but still too dense - still could be lighter. In take 3, I changed the mixing method, the same method I use in my vanilla cupcake recipe. Take 3's texture was perfect but somehow the lightness diluted the pumpkin spices. In take 4, I increased the spices by about 50% and it was just the right texture and flavor.
I love the experimentation and tweaking of recipes, but there's always the problem of what to do with all the cupcakes. There was a community bake sale last week to raise money to end child hunger. I donated 2 dozen pumpkin cupcakes, frosted with cream cheese frosting, garnished with a candy corn. One taster said that my cupcake tasted better than the one she had at a New York cupcakery....hmmmm, could it be the mother of all cupcakeries? I'd like to think so.