Yesterday (after working out, going to the bank, making Candyland game pieces with Miss Helping Hands, and before styling Me Darlin' Mither's hair, visiting with my out-of-state Brudder, and cleaning the kitchen and spare refrigerator) I took a little field trip with Able Baker Dana.
We went here:
It's a wonderland of possibilities, and I want to go back.
Omigersh...so many sprinkles, cookie cutters, candy molds and gadgets!
Not to mention the exciting variety of patterns/colors/styles/sizes of cupcake liners!
If I hadn't been singularly focused on getting ready for today, I might have gone nuts.
I was getting ready for today, though, and I'm glad I did.
Because it was one gloriously productive day in the kitchen.
Able Baker Dana was here, and we made many, many, many, many cupcakes for the upcoming wedding.
In the beginning, it looked like any typical batch of cupcakes.
Soon it was a veritable sea of cupcakes.
And the cupcakes were put into neat little boxes and poked with the curling iron.
Just kiddin'.
It was the apple corer.
A few twists of the wrists and moments later...
..."Holey cupcakes, Batman!
Not to worry.
There was a lot of filling made with cream cheese, orange zest, and orange marmalade.
Able Baker Dana manned the pastry bag (she always has fancy fingernails, so I enjoy taking pictures of her hands).
One by one, she filled in all the holes.
We worked so fast that I completely forgot to take pictures of the white cupcakes.
They are divinely moist and delicious, and they have a very yummy hole-filling made with whipped cream and chopped, roasted almonds.
At the end of our combined 13 hours in the kitchen today, we had 180 cupcakes ready for the freezer.
On Saturday, just before the big event, they will be frosted with sweetened whipped cream and sprinkled with a bit of glittery sugar.
They will take their places on the cupcake stand; on all the tiers below the little top cake that is being made just for the bride and groom.
Their cake top will look like this one (from Bride's magazine), but it will have whipped topping which will look like snow:
That's why I was painting and glittering the tips of the little pinecones last week.
And making chocolate pine needles today.
We'll sandwich a few of them in between some of the cupcakes on the cake stand.
I think it's going to be pretty.
Meanwhile, two stellar new (to me) recipes have been added to my recipe binder.
Actually... make that four: two cake recipes and two filling recipes.
I searched the web (what did we do before Google?) for a moist white wedding cake recipe and, after rejecting the first one I tried, I found a super moist, as-good-as-the-bakery recipe.
The recipe calls for 8 egg whites, and I was a little concerned about what to do with all the yolks.
I decided to add some of them to the batter (I'm going to make lemon curd with the others) when I made the new chocolate cake recipe, which, oddly enough, did not call for any eggs at all (I did not use the filling this recipe calls for).
Both kinds of cupcakes taste scrumptious and are very moist.
To fill the white cupcakes, I made a filling with 1 1/2 cups heavy cream, 4 tablespoons sugar, 1 teaspoon almond extract (whipped together until it will form stiff peaks) and some (1 cup?) chopped almond slivers (which I roasted first, to bring out all that luscious nutty flavor).
Filling for the chocolate cupcakes consisted of 16 oz. cream cheese, 1 cup sugar, the zest of one large orange, and two tablespoons of orange marmalade (optional, but it made the filling a little easier to pipe in).
I'm very tired tonight, but I'm happy that I had the pleasure of working with someone I love, for some ones I love.
One other thing: I'd like it if someone would send me some kind of blue ribbon for eating only one bite of white cake and a half teaspoon of both types of filling (strictly for taste-test purposes) while producing this massive amount of yummy goodness.
It nearly killed me.