Hope everyone had a great long weekend! I know I did…a little too long. I am still exhausted! It was a fun weekend though, shared with family and friends. We attended a wedding, went boating, saw hot air balloons and fireworks, and of course ate and drank entirely too much!
Since I wasn’t hosting anything this weekend, I only made a couple of desserts to bring to the parties we attended. I decided to go all out with the red, white and blue theme this year – so if you’re one of those people who has a thing against food coloring, stop reading this right now. Both the cupcakes and cake pops were full of it!
I used this blog post from the Nifty Foodie as my guide for the cupcakes. She used Cook’s Illustrated’s white cake recipe. However, based on this comparison I read from The Way the Cookie Crumbles, I used Dorie Greenspan’s white cake recipe because it seemed like it was consistently a better riser. Additionally, it had less butter and sugar than the CI recipe. I did use CI’s buttercream though. It was an easy recipe and I wasn’t in the mood for cooking egg whites and going through that whole process. I just wanted to throw everything in the mixer and get it done! They turned out good. I’m not a big cupcake person, but I think that is because I’m still searching for my go-to recipes for both cake and frosting.
If you’d like to make the cake pops, Coco & Vanilla has a nice tutorial you can find here. Of course taking a browse through cake pop extraordinaire, Bakerella’s website will give you many wonderfully creative cake pop ideas. I’d recommend a look, she’s the master! I’ve made mine upside-down because I haven’t found a creative way to display them otherwise. You really don’t even need to put them on a stick, but I think it’s more fun.
This is just for fun – look how cute this dog is before we traumatized her with fireworks!
