Wedding Shower Cupcakes

I finally got into a grad school.  Finally finally finally finally.  Now, who knows if I am going to be able to pay for it, but I finally got in.  But three and a half months later, I have an answer.

It's been a crazy week trying to get everything done for student teaching.  On Friday, I drop the "student" part of teaching and get my own classroom.  And I get to teach AP Calculus and Precalculus, two classes that I have always wanted to teach and assumed that I would never even get close to my first year of teaching.  And here I am teaching them before I'm even supposed to be done with student teaching.

And on top of that, I had a wedding shower to plan this week.  It was a little crazy, seeing as most of us were either student teaching or working on finals.  Thank goodness it was pretty small.

But I made cupcakes for the shower.  I've been dreaming up these cupcakes since we started talking about the shower.  I love making cupcakes.  And I feel like I am getting more sophisticated and inventive in designs too.

So, I've been up late like every night this week and the only time I had for making cupcakes was on Thursday night after my last wind ensemble practice ever AND finding out I got into grad school.  So I made cupcakes and finished watching the Young Victoria with MEW.  It was quite relaxing.  And wonderful.

I was just finishing both sugar and flour . . . and I needed just a little more.  I really didn't want to have to buy more for just these last few weeks of school.  Oh well, I guess that's how it works.

There's nothing quite like using 3 sticks of butter and a whole package of cream cheese while baking in one evening.

I also wanted to get the cupcakes in the oven as soon as I could so I wouldn't be up all night, so I made them before I ate dinner.  So I ate lunch at 10:30 in the morning and then dinner at 7:30 at night.  No big deal, right?  I made myself an omelette and heated my canned mushy peas from the British shop.  I love British food.

But anyway, I made chocolate cupcakes with Hershey's Kisses in them.  I thought they were appropriate for a wedding shower.  I used a recipe from a cupcake cookbook specifically for these, but I've come to the conclusion that the cake was a little dry and I would probably just use my favorite chocolate cupcake recipe.

I made the batter, and I filled the cupcake liners about 2/3 full, like you're supposed to for cupcakes, and then stuck a Hershey kiss in the middle till it's submerged in the batter.  Then, the recipe I was using said to leave them like that, but I spooned a little more batter in to cover the hole.

They came out looking wonderful, so I guess it worked.

Then, I decided to make cream cheese frosting, just because it's wonderful.  It's the recipe we use with my favorite carrot cake, and it's soooo good.  I'll admit it, eating the leftovers was my celebration for getting into grad school.

Cream Cheese Frosting


8 oz. cream cheese, softened
1 stick butter, softened
1 tsp. vanilla
1 box powdered sugar

Cream together the cream cheese, butter and vanilla with an electric mixer until it is light and fluffy.  Add in the sugar a little at a time and beat until well combined.

Makes enough to frost 1 two-layer cake.

Then, the wedding colors are blue and white, so I colored the frosting light blue.  It was the first time I'd used gel food color.  It was fun.  I am a fan.

Then I decorated them with blue sugar pearls and white sanding sugar.  I love white sanding sugar.  It's just amazing.

We had a lot of cream cheese at this shower . . . cream cheese frosting, mini-Oreo cheesecake-like-things, cream cheese brownies and cream cheese fruit dip.  I guess we did our part in supporting dairy farmers last night.

Then, I used the leftovers for Mother's day.  Nothing like killing two birds with one stone!  

(P.S. I love you Mom!)