I bought this bad boy for $28 on ebay, shipping included. Why? Because I travel so freakin’ much that it’s sometimes hard to find a hotel with a full kitchen. Solution: Buy a Cupcake Baking machine! I’m seriously happy that this machine even exists. It got good reviews and can make biscuits and cornbread as well-what more could a girl want?
We went to Meijer’s in Troy, Michigan last night and saw a couple of cupcake goodies in their bakery that we just had to buy. They were $1.99 each and they looked so lovely. Happily, they tasted as great as they looked! Not bad for a grocery store…and a lot better than the cupcakes we tried at the Cupcake Kitchen, earlier this week.
The one on the left is an applesauce cupcake, the one on the right is a triple-chocolate. Both were excellent because the frosting was light, not too sweet. I really hate frosting that’s way too sweet, thick and heavy.
Both cakes were very tasty. The chocolate one had small chips throughout the cake and the applesauce one was just wonderful. You could taste the tang of, perhaps, green apple with a hint of cinnamon. It just goes to show that if you put a little effort into the baking you can come up with a good product.
It’s not all about the decoration. If it tastes like a pile of sugar, through and through, with no discernible spice or real taste, who’s going to buy the cupcake more than once?
This picture of the applesauce cupcake doesn’t do the baker justice. The flower was so nicely done! I especially loved the light dusting of what tasted like a cinnamon/spice blend.
One of the bennies of traveling all year long is that I can visit a lot of cupcake shops! Last night Jeff and I headed out in the rain to go to the ‘Cupcake Kitchen’ in Clinton County, Michigan. The shop is in the Partridge Creek mall, at 17410 Hall Road.
The Partridge Creek Mall is a new, outdoor mall and the ‘Cupcake Kitchen’ was beautiful, with lots of seating, but the shop was tucked into a corner at the end of the mall and the entrance was on the side, way at the back. It was a little hard to find.
Cupcake cost: $2.75 per cupcake, $16 per half dozen, $25 per dozen. The cupcakes are really big. I like them regular sized, or mini, myself. They’re about the size of 2 regular cupcakes.
We bought 2: A Boston Cream Pie cupcake and a Cookie Dough cupcake. I forgot to take pictures of them at the time, and once the baker had placed them into a clear container and and pushed the lids down, she squashed the tops of the cakes. So now, they aren’t pretty enough to photograph. Plus, that’s sad!
The Boston Cream Pie is the chocolate-topped one in the picture above. I guess the other one didn’t show up in my pictures. The Boston Cream Pie cupcake had a firm, almost chocolate bar topping, which was great. The cupcake was just plain vanilla and I complained that there was no soft, creamy filling, as you’d expect in a Boston Cream Pie. We took 2 days the finish the cupcakes, eating them a little piece at a time-finally, on one of the last bites, there it was, 1/2 teaspoon of filling. Pretty disappointing.
The Chocolate chip cookie dough cupcake might has well have been called “Vanilla,” because that’s what both the cake and the frosting tasted like…nary a hint of cookie dough flavor or bits were in site. If it weren’t for the small piece of cookie placed on top of the cupcake, there wouldn’t have been any “cookie” at all in the cupcake.
This is a brilliant idea for a baby shower!
I know you can barely see this, this picture is horrible. They were making cupcakes for a woman who was having twins. What a simple idea-twin babies under a blanket. I love these:
I’m an inspirational novelist and an artist and I love to blog. When I realized that my cupcake obsession was threatening to take over my writing blog, it occurred to me I should move “all things cupcake”, here.
I adore cupcakes. Yes, I love to eat them, but when I’d completed a cake decorating class years ago, I’d licked so much frosting off my fingers that I was a bit grossed out by the thought of eating cake. So, my goal is not to eat the cupcakes so much as it is to create them.
It’s been years since I’ve decorated and cupcakes are the ideal “medium” for me.
First, because I don’t want to weigh 900 pounds, second, because they’re little works of art, third, because I can hand them off to everyone else to enjoy, one little cupcake at a time-thereby avoiding the whole 900 pound thing.
I travel a LOT because my husband works for a major airplane building company out of Seattle and his job keeps him on the road for ¾ of the year. If I didn’t travel with him, we’d never see each other.
Our home is in Albuquerque. We spend about 1/3 of the year there, in fits and starts, and about 3-4 months in Michigan and 3-4 months in Seattle. We’ve been married 29 years in September.
Because I travel a lot, it’s challenging to bake. I’m coming up with some very cool solutions for that, which I’ll blog about later. This week I bought these two books and am having them shipped to my home in New Mexico because I’m in Michigan for another week
Katie's Cupcake Kitchen 