Tutorial- Chocolate embellished cupcakes

This year for my little lady's birthday party I decided to go with cupcakes.  Her birthday is a few days before Valentine's day (which is one of my favorite holidays) and since I love extending this holiday I decided to go with a red, pink, white and heart shaped theme.  I wanted to do something simple, unique and elegant. Its hard sometimes to do it all especially when cupcakes are involved but I thought hey lets give it a try.  The idea of using melted chocolate to create hearts popped into my head.  At first I tried to melt re chocolate and cut it with metal cookies cutters.  Then I put some squiggles on top with pink.  It looked cute but it wasn't really what I was going for.  Then I decided I would create hearts as if it was piping.  It was awesome!  It really worked out exactly how I pictured it would!!  I love them.  This will not be the last time I use chocolate to create edible shapes.  Wanna give it a try?  Alright!!

First:  I melted my chocolate in a microwave safe bowl.  First put it in for 30 seconds then stir, continue doing this until the chocolate is completely melted- or until there are no more than 1 or 2 bumps left 0 you don't want to do too much or you will burn the chocolate- YUCK!
*While this is in the microwave- lay out some wax paper.

Yum!!

Next: I put the melted chocolate into a small ziplock baggie and cut one corner.  I cut it very slightly so the hole wasn't too big.  Make the hole the width that you want your lines.

Next: I began drawing little hearts with my baggie on the wax paper.  I probably made about 100 hearts.  Way more than I needed but it took me a while to get the hang of it and figure out what I wanted them to look like.

Finally: Let the hearts dry and then place them on the cake or cupcakes or whatever you plan on putting them on.

Ideas:
I made a bunch of little dots the same size.  This might be fun to do a polkadot cake and use it instead of fondant.
You could write someones name right on the cake with chocolate.
You could do stars, squares, dots, peace signs- whatever you want.  SO MANY OPTIONS!

These cupcakes were so fast and so easy but got SO MANY COMPLIMENTS! 

Go create your own!

Scaredy Cat Brownies

 Yesterday at school we celebrated my daughter's birthday! Since her birthday is so close to Halloween she chose to taken in a scarey treat to share! I showed her these Scaredy Cat Brownies and she loved them! For the receipe I will once again send you over to the Martha Stewart Everyday Food blog. In that recipe she has you make brownies from scratch and include mint patties in the middle of the brownies as well as on top for the cat faces. I decided to take the easy path and just use a brownie mix and do the cats on top.
I used a 9x13 pan and managed to squeeze 20 cat faces per pan. This was ok since I was making them for 5 and 6 year olds. If I were making them for adults, I probably would have only done 15 per pan so they could be a little bigger brownie bites.

 For as high maintenance as it looks, they actually went quite fast. When you put the mint patties on top of the warm brownies they will start to get a little melty, which is then the perfect time to place the candy eyes and chocolate chip ears on the bats. Once the patties are completely cooled then you can use the gel frosting for the mouth.

Happy Haunting with some spooky treats!

Halloween Goodies

Drool right? YES! I love peanut butter, so putting it in mini cupcakes with a Reeses in it is heavenly! So the official name of these little darlings is Mini Triple Treat Cupcakes. For the recipe you can visit the Martha Stewart Everyday Food site. I took these treat into Kindergarten on Monday and they were a big hit. The teacher had also made rice pudding for the kids since they are learning the letter R, but these went off way better to the class than the rice pudding! hehe  I have never made this kind of treat before and it ended up being super easy. I went and bought mini cupcake pans for this, and with the recipe you bake both pans at the same time, which made the whole process very quick! These treats would be great to make for the masses since you are baking 48 at one time!! Try the recipe and share some, everyone will be glad you did!!

Healthy Snack

So Wednesday I had to make the healthy snack for my daughter's Kindergarten class. I wanted to be tricky and bring something cute, not just a pack of string cheese (I did that last time anyway!) So I search the internet and pinterest (you'll be hearing a lot about pinterest from me, it is my second love next to my husband!!) From that searching I came up with these apple/marshmallow smiles! There are several different versions on the internet, but this seemed the cutest and most manageable for me. This is pretty self explanitory, cut apple slices, spread a thin layer of peanut butter on one side of all the slices and press the marshmallows into it, to with a second apple slice.  The problems I encountered were that the apples I used (honey crisp) were too big for my apple slicer. I was trying to go fast because I needed to make 20 of these smiles in 20 minutes.  I got slowed down having to cut some of the apples the old fashioned way. :)  Also, once they were assembled, I was placing them in a foil pan with high sides. I needed to prop them up against each other because they were falling apart very easy. Then when the snack was delivered the teacher wasn't around for me to explain what I had done, so the snack got passed out wrong. My daughter came home with half of the pan full of these things. I like to do things the cute way, but I think from now on for healthy snack day I'll stick to packaged string cheese, or regular muffins!

Halloween Cake Balls

 At my house we are VERY into Halloween! So I definitely am very excited to be making and taking treats into my daughter's Kindergarten class many times this month!

This week I decided to bring in a not-so-healthy snack on Monday. This is what greeted the kids today... Ghost heads and Monster Eyes!!! Spoooooookyyyy! These adorable Halloween treats are called cake balls. They are a new fad in desserts these days and the directions I used can be found here.

I used a Devil's food cake mix and milk chocolate frostings for the cake balls, and white melting chocolate to cover them. I also found the awesome sparkly black gel in a tube at Walmart in the cake decorating section!

Cake balls are pretty easy, but do need to made with plenty of time before the event you are preparing them for as there is chill time involved multiple times in the process. I used 1 cake mix and was able to make about 54 cake balls. If you are a big pinterest fan as I am, you will be able to find lots of cute cake balls and cake pops on there for every holiday!

I couldn't resist trying one before I send them off to school! Yummy!

Stay tuned for more treats. Wednesday it is my turn to take in the HEALTHY snack for school, and it also is a Halloween theme!