This is a super cute dessert idea for winter-themed parties, and it isn’t much harder than making and frosting cupcakes. If you have a sharp knife, some toothpicks, a piping bag and a star tip, you’re good to go. It’s even more fun to make than it is to look at, or eat!

All I did was bake some cupcakes, cut them into cone shapes, stack them (secured with toothpicks) and then frosted them in such a way so that they looked like pine trees. Powdered sugar adds a little snow. At first I was bummed that my powdered sugar had so many HUGE lumps in it, until I realized they looked like little snow boulders. Score! You could get really creative and make little marzipan pine cones, or birds, or squirrels… you get the idea. Why not make a sweet little forest for your friends and family to devour?

Oh man, I just realized I could have built an igloo out of sugar cubes. Next time, I guess!

I used gel food coloring, both green and blue mixed together to get the shade right. Using only green was too light and minty for what I was going for – so make sure you have some blue on hand to darken it up. But there’s no reason your trees need to be green. White trees would be stunning on a darker plate, or other non-standard colors like pink or brown to play up their cutesy, cartoony look.

Basic Sponge Cake
Makes 15 cupcakes (a few extra for practicing)

1 1/3 Cups Soymilk mixed with 1 tsp Apple Cider vinegar
2 Cups All Purpose Flour
1 Cup Sugar
2 tsp Baking Powder
1 tsp Baking Soda
1 Tbs Cornstarch
1/2 tsp Salt
1/4 Cup Oil
1 tsp Vanilla Extract
1 tsp Almond Extract

Preheat oven to 375º F.

Mix soymilk and vinegar. Combine flour, sugar, baking soda, baking powder, cornstarch and salt and mix well. Add oil and extracts to soymilk mixture and whisk. Add wet to dry and fold until just combined. Fill each lined, sprayed cupcake mold with 1/4 cup batter. Bake cupcakes at 375º F for 20 minutes. Remove from pans and let cool completely.

Frosting
Enough for 5-7 trees

1/2 Cup Earth Balance Margarine
1/2 Cup Non-hydrogenated Shortening
1 tsp Vanilla Extract
About 3 Cups Powered Sugar, sifted, more if needed
Food Coloring (green and blue for standard trees)

In a stand mixer, whip margarine and shortening until light and fluffy. Whip in extract. Slowly whip in powdered sugar until icing is fairly stiff. Add coloring bit-by-bit until desired color is reached. Transfer icing to a piping bag fitted it a small/standard sized star tip

Creating the Trees

Bake the cupcakes!

Unwrap the cupcakes and turn them upside-down. With a knife, carve the cupcake into a cone. If needed, flatten the base so the cupcake cone sits without wobbling.

Stack the cupcakes to make basic tree shapes. Three high for tall trees, two high for short trees. Secure with toothpicks. You may want t make the base of your trees squatty so that they help the tree stand.

Create your forest!

Begin icing your trees. If you don’t have a revolving cake platter to ice on, use a small cutting board that you can easily turn as you work. Start from the bottom and ice around and around up towards the top. Use long-ish strokes that end in an upward sweep to create branches. You can go back and fill in holes or weird spots later.

Finish off with shorter, horizontal or upward pointing branches, and then one directly on top pointing straight up. Take a look at your tree and add branches where needed.

Use a spatula to gently and carefully transfer the trees to your serving plate. Add lumps of powdered sugar if you have them, and anything else to finish up the forest scene. Sprinkle with powdered sugar to add snow to the trees.

Happy winter!

A friend of mine is having a going away party tonight. She got a great job in NYC, and they want her there immediately! Good news for her, but bad news for us here in Boston!

The party is also a Knit Night, so I thought I’d bring some appropriately decorated cupcakes. This was my first time working with marzipan, and what fun it is! Like, four hours of fun.

Speaking of the party, I gotta go! Forgive my lack of words; I hope I can make up for it with the ridiculous amount of photos!

On February 25th, 2008 I was on the Martha Stewart Show showing Martha how to make these. Here’s the clip!

Photo tutorials here.

I hope my US readers had a wonderful long weekend! Summer seems just around the corner, so I’ve been thinking about ice cream. And cupcakes. And cupcake versions of ice cream. These are more recognizable as cupcakes than my last attempt at ice cream look alike cupcakes, and easier to eat to boot.

Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World has a recipe for banana split cupcakes, but I wanted something simpler (read: I was already half-way through making my own version when I realized Isa and Terry had probably already thought of it, and lo and behold, it’s on page 81). These here are the Golden Vanilla Cupcakes. It’s my default yellow cake recipe, if you haven’t noticed.

The frosting is banana buttercream, but don’t worry, it doesn’t have any icky banana extracts in it. I hate banana-flavored things – only the real deal with suit me! If you blend a banana into your frosting you get a light but yummy banana flavor that doesn’t taste like chemical bananas. So that’s good, right?

Simple Banana Split Cupcakes
Makes 12 Cupcakes

1 Batch Golden Vanilla Cupcakes, cooled (air conditioners cool more than people)
12 Maraschino Cherries
1/2 Cup Chococlate Chips, melted (or pre-made chocolate sauce)
2 Tbs Soymilk
Chopped Nuts, optional (peanuts are classic)
Sprinkles
Banana Buttecream

Banana Buttercream Frosting
1/2 Cup Earth Balance, softened
1/2 Cup Non-Hydrogenated Vegetable Shortening, softened
1 Ripe Banana
3/4 Box Powdered Sugar

Bake and cool cupcakes. Place chocolate chips and soymilk in a double boiler and melt slowly, whisking until smooth. Set aside. Whip frosting ingredients together until smooth and airy; use a stand mixer if available.

Frost cupcakes, add cherries. Drizzle with chocolate sauce and sprinkle with nuts, if using. Use extra banana slices or dried banana chips for an extra garnish.

Happy birthday Dennis. I hope you don’t check my blog before I get to your house, because this is one of the 26 miniature birthday presents I’m bringing you. I bet you can’t guess what the other 25 are.

I have to confess. I had cupcakes and kettle corn for dinner.

I originally wanted to make caramel corn, but a quick google revealed that all caramel corn recipes require corn syurp (which I don’t have) and over an hour in preparation and baking (which I don’t want to give!).

Kettle corn, on the other hand, only requires popcorn, sugar, salt, and oil. And it’s done when the corn is done popping.

Kettle Corn
Makes one big bowl

1/2 Cup Popcorn Kernels
1/4 Cup Oil (I used canola)
1/4 Cup Sugar
Salt

Heat oil in a large pan with a lid. Add corn, and when you see the kernels are about to pop, add sugar and shake pan. Remove from heat when you’re only hearing a pop every five seconds ago – I’m serious about this! The sugar makes it even easier to scorch than plain popcorn, so take it off the heat already!

Sprinkle on some salt (about 1/2 tsp) and serve.

The cupcakes I made were pretty but standard:

I made them to bribe my landlord to put up my new pot rack. Mission accomplished!

Real food tomorrow. Promise.

I think everyone knows my inspiration here. Oh man. So satisfying.

I baked the vanilla cupcakes right in the cones. They took an extra two minutes to bake, but other than that it was easy. I piped on vanilla vegan buttercream to resemble softserve, then hand-dipped them in some melted chocolate and let them sit in the freezer for a moment to cure.

The result? Stewart complains that I tricked him. They look so much like ice cream, but are most definitely not, making them a most confusing confection. I think the dark chocolate and the sweet frosting nearly recreates the real thing – who cares if they’re hard to eat when they’re so fun to look at!

I know what you’re thinking.

What the hell are those?!

Well, you see, I had an idea. Some of my ideas are great. And then there are ideas like this one. It starts off promising, and then, well, smoosh.

So let me explain this cupcake misadventure.

I thought, hey New Year’s! Times Square… ball dropping… Count Down Cupcakes! The idea was to have a sugar crystal frosting ball suspended over chocolate cupcakes. You unwrap the cupcake, pull the stem through the bottom and voila! Your crystal ball descends and rings in the new year. You can see this to the left.

But oh, what a smooshy new year it is.

The frosting balls were really heavy, wobbling on their sticks and making larger and larger holes in the cupcakes. As they warmed they slid down their little sticks, ringing in 2007 on their own around 5:30 pm. Something had to be done, and fast.

I settled on removing the sticks and squashing the frosting balls, to make what resemble brightly colored cartoon mushroom caps sitting on top of the cucpakes. Here they are in all their.. glory…

Ah well! Happy New Year! VeganYumYum wishes you good tidings and strange little cupcakes throughout the 2007!

So what do you do when you are waiting for your cupcakes to cool?

Apparently I while away the hours filleting lemon peels with a sharp, sharp knife.

What? Why are you looking at me like that?

The recipe calls for a very tasty lemon glaze, but have had trouble in the past making those look good. You can’t go wrong with piped frosting, so I made a batch of the Lemon Buttercream from VCTOtW for these puppies. But then what? I wanted to use the lemon peel, and my crazy brain kept saying, “use the paper punch!”

It was such a bad idea, I had to try it. Of course, the paper punch was made for, you know, punching paper. The lemon peels had to be thinned a bit or else it wasn’t going to happen. So I filleted them.

Pretty huh? I cut the lemon in four quarters, and got four flowers out of each piece. It wasn’t even a large lemon! I’m definitely going to use this technique again, and I think it’ll work equally well for limes and oranges. Ooohh, the just think of the possibilities. I need to buy more paper punches, stat!

*edit*

Oh man, I should have candied the lemon peel flowers! Not only would you be able to eat them, but they’ll keep for 6 months – I could have made a whole batch of them! I realized I should have candied them last night while I was trying to fall asleep, but was reminded again this morning when I saw the cupcakes and my cute little flowers were all shriveled up. So sad!

I admit, these cupcakes were forced, but I learned a lot.

I still had some leftover frosting from the humongous batch I made the other night, but it was definitely going to have to be used sparingly if I wanted to frost another dozen cupcakes. I thought I would have enough as long as I didn’t pipe the frosting, and I was right. There’s nary a tablespoon leftover. I should have cooled the frosting before spreading, though. It was very sticky and didn’t play well with my frosting spatula.

So, before I decided on what recipe I wanted to make, flipped through VCTOtW and realized that I definitely didn’t want to go to the store to gather ingredients. I remembered that I had some rosewater in the pantry from when we used to make lassis, so I decided to make the Rosewater Pistachio cupcakes, sans pistachio.

So I’m making cupcakes, late at night, without all the right ingredients (I was also missing cornstartch and decided to sub arrowroot), and barely enough frosting… so why not also experiment with my new cupcake liners? These are pretty, but this is not the best application for them. They can be stunning but I missed the mark here. While this is a perfectly acceptable batch of cupcakes, they don’t quite have the visual affect that I usually shoot for. They are more “happy birthday!” than “welcome to my bakery!” But whatever, who doesn’t love birthday cupcakes!?

They cooked faster than I intended leaving the bottom of each one not burnt but definitely browned. I think that’s because they weren’t in a cupcake pan, but on a cookie sheet, allowing them to get hotter faster. I wouldn’t say they were overcooked – the crumb was absolutely perfect. It was soft, silky, spongy and moist. You can see the color variation I’m talking about below.

The liners were sort of difficult to remove, so much so that I’d hesitate serving these to a group. No one wants to fuss with their cupcake, trying to use enough force to rip through the paper but no so much that you end up holding a squashed mess. Perhaps if you cut through the rolled edge in a few places before baking this task would be easier to manage, but who wants to do that? As soon as I caught myself considering that as an option, I realized how ridiculous I was being. These are cupcakes, not ketchup packets.

Once you get them out of their wrapper, however, they’re a real treat. Since they’re taller than your usual cupcake, you really feel like you’re eating a miniature cake instead of a cupcake. I might use these liners if I wanted to serve cupcakes without the wrappers, or perhaps if I intended on making miniature cakes. Frosted on all sides and decorated, these would look outstanding.

Wow. That was a lot about cupcakes. I’m a total cupcake nerd.

I can’t help myself. I had leftover frosting from yesterday’s cupcakes, and it was calling to me. It was all ready to go in the piping bag and everything. I took it out of the fridge to come to room temp and started the cupcakes around 9:00. It’s past midnight now, but they’re done and they look adorable. I don’t know why it took me so long to realize that I should put maraschino cherries on top of everything. Nothing will be spared!

Stewart gets to take the batch to work tomorrow. Thankfully our largest tupperware container only fits eight cupcakes – I won’t feel guilty about making him leave four of them at home for us to devour!

As usual, more gratuitous cupcake pics up on flickr.