Haley’s 4th birthday cupcakes: chocolate with Hershey’s kiss centers and vanilla buttercream frosting in fun cotton candy colours with classic rainbow round sprinkles and teeny forest creatures who love you. WARNING: THESE WILL MAKE YOU FAT!

Last week I asked Haley what kind of cupcakes she wanted and this is what she said:

“Uuuuuuum” she placed a thoughtful finger on her chin “I want vanilla, no chocolate, CHOCOLATE with purple icing, no PINK. YA!”  and then she jumped around all crazy like.  So, she got purple pink and blue chocolate chocolate cupcakes.  See what I did there?  Her indecisiveness made these even crazier than necessary!

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I think they turned out really pretty.  I’ve definitely gotten a lot more comfortable with the piping bag that’s for sure.  I found this time around that listening to great music while you bake makes your baking MUCH better!  That, and finding little tips to make your life easier for things like filling a piping bag, or not cleaning stuff out until absolutely necessary.

I used the Martha’s One Bowl Chocolate Cupcake recipe for the cake base but cooked them for 5 minutes, pulled them out and inserted Hershey’s kiss chocolates into the centre, then popped them back into the oven to bake for an additional 10 minutes.  The recipe says to bake for 20 minutes, but I found that 15 minutes was enough and the cake was nice and moist, which anyone who bakes cupcakes knows is usually not the case.  I was really pleased with the texture this time. I’ve found for a lot of baking recipes the bake time is much longer than it needs to be and the end product is a lot dryer then I like it.  Here is my playlist for baking cupcakes:

Now, onto the frosting.  For the frosting I used the Billy’s Vanilla Buttercream recipe which is one of those frostings that’s always going to turn out amazing.  Here is my frosting playlist:

For colouring the frosting I used just red and blue food colouring from the grocery store.  I’m not really a fan of food colouring, mostly just because of the mess and I’m accident prone.  This time was no different!  I dropped the blue on the floor with the cap off and it got all over my skirt 😦

I started with filling a bowl and mixing in the red for pink icing.  I popped on a large star tip on my piping bag, placed it inside a vase and folded down the edges, then filled it with a spatula.  I did it again for the purple by mixing the red and blue together, and then did a batch of blue.  I didn’t clean out anything as I went, I had a couple cupcakes that had two colours on it which looked great.

I obviously liked the blue ones best, something about blue and brown together appeals to me.

I have WAY too many cupcakes left though, someone come help me eat them!!!