Thanksgiving!

My friend Jill and I had a baking night last week. We were both in charge of bringing desserts to Thanksgiving. She made a cranberry-orange cream pie and I made a gingersnap caramel pumpkin cheesecake.

Because we didn't want to wait until the next day to try our desserts, we made "cupcakes" of each dessert. Delicious!

Success was achieved!

(P.S. We got our recipes from The Pioneer Woman. Her recipes go step-by-step and show pictures for each step. So easy to follow!)

Ahhh! Christmas is coming!

This...

...means it's time for this...

Have a Happy Thanksgiving and be safe while shopping on Friday! It's going to be crazy!

Sprinkles EAT Box

Just in time for Thanksgiving...Sprinkles introduces several limited-time cupcake flavors! For November 21-30 Sprinkles is selling their EAT Box.

The EAT Box contains four different flavors of cupcakes: Ginger Maple (ginger cake with maple cream cheese frosting), Pumpkin (my new favorite), Orange Cranberry (orange cake with cranberries, topped with white chocolate cream cheese frosting), and Dark Chocolate.

These are the perfect desserts for your Thanksgiving dinner. I would choose these over pumpkin pie any day!

Natural Selection Leads to Something New

Not Surprised: I have reviewed Sweet Lorraines at the Irvine Spectrum twice. Both times I was forced to give a bad review. So I wasn't surprised to not see Sweet Lorraines when I stopped by the Spectrum on Friday night. You can't expect a bad cupcakery to stay in business. Natural selection applies to cupcake shops too.
Surprised! I was surprised to see another cupcake shop in its place. The name of the new bakery is SweetSpot Baker's Workshop. My first thought was, oh no, I hope it's not going to be the same as Sweet Lorraines but with a different name. Fortunately, when I opened my google reader this morning I found a post by the Fast Food Maven detailing this new shop.

SweetSpot opens today and will sell cupcakes for $3.25. So what makes them different? They will also offer make-you-own-cupcake services. For $4.25 you can pick a flavor of cupcake and then decorate it with your own toppings and frosting. I think this is a great idea for birthday parties and decorating classes. I'm not sure how many people will want to decorate their own cupcakes during their shopping experience. But this is definitely a new concept...I have not heard of any other cupcakery offering this service.

I haven't reviewed a cupcakery in a while so I think I will need to take a trip to the Irvine Spectrum sometime this week. It just won't be on Black Friday.

Does Mammoth Love Cupcakes?

I couldn't have been more excited to hear that Mammoth Mountain opened early this year! We took a quick trip up last weekend for Opening Weekend. The snow was great, the weather was perfect, and we had a blast! Of course, before we left, I researched cupcakes in Mammoth Lakes. I was having no luck at all.

After dinner on Saturday night, my husband suggested dessert at the Mogul Restaurant. When I saw the dessert menu, I was excited to see something called Cinnamon Charlotte. I wasn't sure exactly what it was, but the description touted a white cupcake. Of course I was intrigued, especially since it has been a house specialty since 1971! We ordered it, along with the Almond Mocha Fudge Ice Cream Pie.

The Cinnamon Charlotte comes in a glass. It has a white cupcake on the bottom, two scoops of Dreyer's vanilla ice cream, and a hot cinnamon sauce on top. The cinnamon sauce was similar to a carmel sauce. It was definitely different than the cupcake dessert I was imagining, but it was good. The group consensus was a thumbs-up.

The ice cream pie was also very tasty! If you are ever in Mammoth Lakes, the Mogul is a great place to stop for dessert. We will be going up to Mammoth many times this snowboarding season, so I am sure we will be frequenting this restaurant.

Thanksgiving Cupcakes

I can't believe how fast the holidays are approaching! I haven't done any Christmas shopping yet and Thanksgiving is next week! Speaking of Thanksgiving, I have come across a few cute Thanksgiving-themed cupcakes.

These Turkey Pops are the Cupcake Pops that Bakerella bakes. I love how cute they look! Although I am personally not a candy corn fan, everyone else in the world is. The candy corn will add another taste to Bakerella's normal Cupcake Pops.

I love how pumpkin transitions from Halloween to Thanksgiving. I love pumpkin and would be sad if only one holiday supported it. These Pumpkin Pie Cupcakes look so tasty! And what a great idea to make them look like mini pumpkin pies. I think I am going to bake and decorate some for Thanksgiving next week.

And if I do make cupcakes and need to transport them somewhere, I will be able to use my new Cupcake Carrier! My wonderful sister gave this to me for my birthday (which is today!). I can't wait to test it out. I think that is a good enough reason to make some cupcakes!

The Only Thing Better than Cupcakes

Friday is the big day! Twilight finally hits theaters! As much as I want to see this movie on the day it premieres, I will postpone my enjoyment one extra day to avoid the stampede of teenage girls.

In celebration of the opening of this movie, I am posting a few pictures of two of my favorite things--cupcakes and Twilight. Enjoy and go see the movie this weekend!

BTW, I'm Team Edward!

Wish Granted

Imagine my delight when I stopped by a friend's house after work on Friday and he gave me this! I asked if he had read my blog, but he had not. He must have just read my mind. Thank you Hud, you are my birthday hero!

Birthday Wishes

My birthday is coming up next week. Put aside all of my other wants of bike helmets, waterproof cameras, and mountain bike shoes...all I really want is a Sprinkles Pumpkin Cupcake. (Good news! They are being offered every day for the month of November!)

Cupcakes Pick the Winner

Thank goodness the elections are over! I felt like that's all people were talking about. Of course it is a good thing for people to be involved in our country's future, but this year there were a lot of heated arguments.

I came across an article about people voting for president by cupcakes at Crumbs Bakeshop in New York. The author said that the Obama cupcakes were sold out, while none of the McCain cupcakes had been sold.

I have seen quite a few other places with a similar idea. The Fast Food Maven posted about how 7-11 sells Obama and McCain coffee cups near election time. Supposedly, 7-11 coffee drinkers vote eerily similar to the actual election results. Looks like cupcake lovers and coffee drinkers have something in common...they both knew who would be the next President of the United States, Barack Obama.

Let Down

A few weeks ago my husband and I were in LA for the Vans Downtown Showndown. Since we were going to be in LA, I googled cupcake stores (on my awesome new phone) so I could treat myself to some cupcakes. I found one--Johnny Cupcakes, and it was only a mile from where we were going.

We arrived at the store and I jumped out of the car (since we were in a hurry). I ran into the store and was greeted by the smell of yummy cupcakes. I looked into the glass display cases, but did not see cupcakes...only t-shirts. What?! I asked if they sold cupcakes and the disappointing answer was, "No."

I think this is a lame concept. People probably walk into that store all day and are disappointed by the lack of cupcakes. Johnny Cupcakes needs to sell cupcakes, otherwise they are just using the concept of cupcakes to sell clothes.

Cupcake Activist Shirts

My husband agreed to go along with our team name of "Cupcake Activists" for the Muddy Buddy if he could design our shirts. The night before our race we worked for hours on our shirts. They turned out great! The front has my husband's cupcake logo--a cupcake with two lightning bolts underneath. On the back we stenciled my website so that everyone we passed during the race could see it.

Muddy Buddy Cupcakes

Yesterday was the day that the Cupcake Activists ruled the Muddy Buddy! For the third year in a row, my husband and I competed in the Muddy Buddy. This race consists of a 6-7 mile course of mountain biking and trail running. It is a team race where you leap-frog between riding the bike and running. At the end of the course is a 100-foot mud pit. You have to crawl through the mud pit, on your stomach, to the finish line. We had a great time and even improved our time from the previous year by five minutes! It must have been because we were fueled by cupcakes!
This year we chose the team name "Cupcake Activists." We designed t-shirts (pictures coming soon) and I baked cupcakes. Behold...Muddy Cupcakes!

These cupcakes consisted of a triple chocolate fudge cake, milk chocolate frosting, chocolate graham cracker crumbles, and a gummy worm on top. I was going to use Oreos for the mud, but these graham crackers had a lighter color, closer to the color of mud.

The purpose of being a cupcake activist is to spread the love of cupcakes. I baked plenty of cupcakes to hand out to our fellow racers and friends. After pushing your body for an hour or so, a cupcake was the perfect reward!

My friend's daughter couldn't resist eating the gummy worm first. Who am I kidding?.... I ate the gummy worm first too!

Being covered in mud didn't stop anyone from eating these cupcakes. The good thing was that the cupcakes were the same color as the mud so you couldn't tell when you were eating mud. They were delicious!

I'm already counting down the days until next year's race. I wonder what kind of cupcakes I will make for 2009.