Wedding Cupcakes!

I know, it's been a while.  I figured that a Honeymoon might just be a good excuse to not blog.  Just saying.

It feels like years ago when I was making the favors before the wedding already.  Wow.  It seems like it was a long time ago.

I spent most of the week before the wedding making 10 dozen cupcakes.  Mom was convinced that it was going to be crazy and stressful.  It wasn't, thankfully.  I spent two mornings working on them, and I was done by 1:30 each day!  Well, I was done making/frosting/packing them by 1:30.  I still had some cleaning up to do.  Cleaning up was a big job.

First of all, I spent some time a couple weeks before the wedding making the rings for the tops.

Using white candy melts and a ziplock bag, plus a pattern I made in Word and wax paper, I traced the circles with the melted chocolate.  I made a ton of them.  There may still be a bunch in a plastic container in my parents' fridge.

On Monday morning, I got out a ton of butter.  That was the beginning of both days.  I used a lot of butter.  A lot, lot, lot of butter.  Oops.

And, well, as far as actually making the cupcakes go, Monday went pretty well!  Well, ok, after the first batch.  I kind of missed the fact that the eggs were supposed to go in one at a time and put all 3 in at once.  And then I just mixed up all the other ingredients.  I very nearly even forgot the sugar.  Yeah, that would have been a problem.  I was amazed to find that mixing the ingredients differently actually affected the look of the cupcakes after they baked.  The first ones looked kind of sad and bumpy.  The rest were golden and arched and like any proper cupcakes should be.

 I had never worked out of such large amounts of ingredients.  We went to BJs and got big bags of  flour and sugar.  It was kind of fun.

Then it was time to find space in the kitchen for all 120 cupcakes.

And find space to store them all . . . .  Thank goodness for the boxes from my shower!

I am so happy that the polka dot cupcake liners showed up wonderfully with the cupcakes!

And then it was time to clean up.  Poor KitchenAid mixer.  I don't think it had ever seen so much use.  And it got to do it all over the next day!

And how did I start day two?  More butter!  Lots more butter.

I used the Real Simple frosting recipe I tried on the Fourth of July -- and it came out even better when I made a full batch instead of half!  And it's really growing on me.  I really like it.  And it's so simple.

I think I ended up using about three recipes of frosting.  Not the five I expected.  Which was good.  And I even used a lot per cupcake.  It was great.

And while I was at my frosting station, frosting the cupcakes, edging them with edible pearls, and adding sanding sugar and the rings . . .

dad and mom were packing them into boxes . . .

adding NES's origami hearts to the top . . .

and packing up the boxes into the bags ready to go to the wedding!

They were a great help.  I don't know how long all that would have taken if they hadn't been helping!

And because I just can't cover all the details of everything at the wedding, I'll steal a few pictures from my mother, mother-in-law, aunt, and AMS to show you the details!

 (Polka dot socks and shoes!!! This actually comes from a funny story: when we were first planning our wedding, NES mentioned having the groomsmen wear polka dot socks as something that would just get a definitive "no" from me . . . you can see how that went!)

 (Family photos!)

(These bottles were on each table and the pinwheels were the table numbers!)