I know, I know.. I’ve been making a lot of cupcakes lately. What can I say? Cupcakes are popular! People at my husband’s job have been requesting them, I’ve been making gluten free ones, vegan ones… gluten free Vegan ones… They just seem to be the trend right now.

…So I figure why not keep going with it, at least for one more day. Tomorrow I’m going to make cookies, and we’ll probably have a few tarts and fruit desserts between now and the end of next week..

But today… I had to make a bunch of cupcakes. Why? I figure if I’m going to go to one of the damnportlanders  meetups, I’m going to bring something to smooth my entrance. I’m a very shy person at first, even with my husband with me (he’ll be at the meetup tonight too. He’s got a livejournal, but he hasn’t upneverbashfulwithbutter.comhttp://www.neverbashfulwithbutter.comdated it since we were first dating! hahaha. )

Alright..  Since a Livejournal meetup is essentially a bunch of computer nerds having an online conversation minus the online and plus beer, I thought that my first meetup would be a perfect time to unveil my most recent cupcake experiment!

Purple Nerd-Cakes!!!

They actually taste pretty good…

They’ve got Nerds candies inside the cake and sprinkled on top. And in my own personal effort to “Keep Portland weird” I chose grape. I mean, the two most popular flavours of nerds are grape and strawberry, and strawberry doesnt seem like too strange of a cake flavour..

So grape it is!

And now, I’ve got to go finish icing another batch of 12 of these. So, I’ll be bringing a few batches with me! Two batches of these, and two batches of lemon cakes with cream cheese filling with strawberries on top.

mmm..

Sometimes a simple yellow cake can be spruced up with the addition of some flavourful little candies, a little lemon juice and some purple food coloring.

Alright, so these cupcakes served a dual purpose. I had a surplus of grape nerd candies in my house, and they needed to go away, or I just know I’d eat them all… AND I needed to make cupcakes to bring with me to an event this evening.

I’ll tell you what. They were a hit. Everyone that had one liked it, and I was even pretty happy with how they turned out.

All I did, honestly, was alter the recipe I used for the Cherry and chocolate chunk cupcakes, and ice them with some purple “fruit punch” icing, and top with some nerds. Seriously. They were really pretty good.

And just so you know, the basic yellow cupcake recipe that I’ve been altering for the last two sets of cupcakes (and another set of cupcakes I made today that I DIDN’T photograph) is the best recipe ever.

So here is the recipe I used today. Note the (parenthesis)’s.

1/2 cup softened butter
2/3 cup granulated white sugar
3 large eggs
1 teaspoon lemon juice
2 Tablespoons grape jelly
1 1/2 cups cake flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup milk (if you use all purpose flour instead of cake flour, you may need another 1/4 of milk)
1/4 cup grape nerds
2 drops red food colouring
1 drop blue food colouring

Cream the butter and sugar together until soft and fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time, whisking well between eggs.

Mix in the lemon juice and grape jelly. In a separate bowl, mix together the flour, baking powder and salt. Add this dry mixture to the egg mixture in three parts, alternating with the addition of the milk. If the batter is too thick, add a bit more milk, it will not hurt, just don’t exceed an additional 1/2 cup milk. Add the food colouring at this point, mix well.

Finally, fold the nerds candies into the batter.

Spoon into papered muffin cups and bake at 350 for about 15-20 minutes or until the tops are light golden brown.

The cool thing about these, is that the candies in the cupcake dissolve a little, and they’re not crunchy at all. All the candies do is add a grape flavour to the cake! The lemon juice enhances the flavour, and the grape jelly adds a bit of a realistic grape flavour to them.

I made a basic buttercream recipe only I added a touch of lemon extract, cherry extract, strawberry extract and apple extract. A little more purple food colouring and YAY! PURPLE NERD CAKES! Sprinkle with nerds and you’re good to go.

-A.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 1st, 2008 at 1:37 am and is filed under April 2007, The Cupcakes!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.