Lemon Meringue Cupcakes for Strider

A few weeks ago, I made some very special cupcakes. After years with our dog, he was getting very sick and it was time for him to leave us. Because I show love through my baking, my sister and I made him these pink lemonade cupcakes as a special treat before we went to the vet. Read on - there are pictures of a dog eating a cupcake at the end of this post!

 

Pink lemonade cake mix fancied up with some sour cream, lemon pudding mix, and fresh lemon zest. 

 

Fluffy meringue frosting courtesy of Martha Stewart's 7-minute frosting recipe. 

 

Which, by the way, took much longer than 7 minutes to make.  

 

My sister and I took turns frosting the cupcakes.  I piled the frosting on high while she took a more creative approach.

In this smiley face cupcake you can see the lemon curd added to the centers to give them a nice punch.

They were very moist and tasty, super lemony, and just the right amount of fancy. We hit them with a blowtorch for the brown color and toasty flavor. For the record, blowtorch + paper cupcake liners make for a volatile situation...literally.

And of course, Strider loved them too.

After dinner we all got ready to feed him his cupcake. We took off the cupcake liner and put down the plate...

 

I rushed to my camera to take a shot. He gulped it down so quickly that this was the first picture I was able to get!

Mmm...human food!

Someone loves cupcakes!

Making sure to lick up every last drop of meringue. 

Thank you Dr. Shane for taking such good care of Strider. We love you as much as Strider loved his cupcake!

Father's Day Cookies for a Golfer

Father's day is coming up - what does your dad like to do on his special day? One of my uncles likes to golf, so his wife and daughters asked me to make up some special golfing cookies for him.

I love the bright, limited color palette for these golf cookies. The intensity of the colors, however, made them bleed a bit. I hope the colors last until Sunday!

This little golf bag cookie has some personalization at the bottom and is stuffed with golf clubs of all shapes and sizes. The plaid pattern was a fun way to incorporate more colors into the cookie.

A little golf ball on a red tee with grass growing up all around it. 

 
I bet you never realized decorated sugar cookies could be so manly.

Fluffy white clouds in a blue sky - a perfect day for golfing!

A red flag marks the 18th hole. 

Makes a great cookie golf scene, doesn't it. 

See the special Father's Day cookie? It made 13 cookies total, a baker's dozen.

Happy Father's Day and don't forget to do something nice with your dad this weekend to show him how much you love him! I'm working on a special dessert for mine, I'll post pictures when it's finished this Sunday!

More Macarons - Lemon, Strawberry, Chocolate, and Mint

I went crazy with the macarons and made about 100 little sandwiches over the course of one weekend.

 3 flavors of shells: lemon, chocolate, and strawberry.

The lemon shell was made with fresh lemon zest (easy peasy) but the strawberry was a bit more complicated.

Strawberry. I made this flavor by slicing strawberries very thin and baking the berries in the oven at a low temperature for a few hours to dehydrate them. When they were dry, I put them in the blender to turn them into intensely flavored strawberry powder and mixed that in with the macaroni batter.

3 kinds of fillings: swiss meringue butter cream, strawberry cheesecake, and chocolate mint.

The strawberry cheesecake was made using my favorite cream cheese frosting recipe and adding fresh strawberry puree.

The chocolate mint is a mint infused chocolate ganache. I soaked fresh mint leaves in simmering milk before making the ganache and combined with the dark chocolate it was the perfect hint of flavor.

These french macarons were gobbled up in no time.

They have a fabulous crunch on the outside but are soft and almost cake-like on the inside. 

 After 100 of these, I think I'm done with macarons for at least the next week.

Cinnamon Roll Cookies

Simply delicious and deceptively easy to make, these are sure to impress. Cinnamon roll cookies that taste exactly like the real thing.

I modified this recipe by throwing a few handfuls of almond flour into the dough and filling. It came out just right!

The dough was wet and a bit hard to work with, especially during the rolling part, but I froze the log for about 20 minutes to make it less sticky and it worked beautifully. In case you haven't noticed, that's my baking solution for just about everything: freeze it!

I drizzled a sweet glaze over these, tasted them after I took pictures, and then dumped a whole lot more glaze on top. Go crazy, it's hard to mess these cuties up.

These cookies were tender, crunchy, sweet and cinnamon-y. 

They were soft and chewy.

Small and delicious. 

Go make these - now.

Coffee Cake, Maddie Style

I made coffee cake. This coffee cake, to be precise.

It was for a picnic and I wanted them to be bite sized, easy to clean up, and even easier to eat.

So of course, I made coffee cake in mini cupcake pans.

The cake was incredibly tender and moist.

But you know the topping is always everyone's favorite part. Cinnamon, brown sugar, toasted walnuts, and mini chocolate chips.

Use your favorite coffee cake recipe and they're perfect for brunch or your own picnic!

Pink Ombre Mother's Day Sprinkle Cake

I love this cake.

Let's say it again: I LOVE this cake. This cake was inspired by this fabulous cake.  My mother saw it online and asked for the same cake, but in pink!

The outside of this tall cake is absolutely covered in rainbow sprinkles. I took all the nonpareils in the sprinkle drawer and mixed them together to make a huge bowl of rainbow sprinkles.

 

And the inside is even more special! Six layers of pink ombre fade, each a bit more pink than the last. 

Creamy white frosting inside. 

Pink cake and sprinkles, what more could you ask for? I served this cake with fresh juicy strawberries. I soaked the berries in juice and sugar, then dumped them on top of everyone's slices. It was the perfect finish!

Just be careful when adding the sprinkles...it's a little hard to get them to stick to the sides and there were sprinkles bouncing all over my kitchen floor as I was throwing them at the cake trying to get them to stick. 

This cake was made for Mother's Day, but it would be fabulous as a birthday cake or as a graduation cake if done in school colors. 

Or any type of celebration cake, really. It's quite festive and I think I'm going to be using this decorating technique quite a bit.

Maybe I should buy some more sprinkles.