Key Lime Pie Cupcakes

A few weeks ago I went to a bridal shower for a friend who is getting married in Miami in a few weeks (her fiance is from there), so the theme of the shower, logically, was Miami.

I was asked to bring dessert and the first thing I thought of was Key lime pie.  But not everyone is into Key lime pie (although I think everyone likes Steve's Key Lime Pie, especially the Swingles), so I decided to bring, yes, cupcakes.

Raspberry Lemonade Cupcakes

Here's the second of the three flavors of cupcakes I made for Matt's brother's wedding a few months ago.  They're a variation on my vanilla cupcakes and the frosting is my standard Swiss meringue buttercream with an ample dose of fresh raspberry puree to make the frosting not only a vibrant shade of pink but also tart and redolent of raspberries.  They're light and bright and perfect for a party.

Chocolate Coffee Porter Cupcakes

Yesterday was my 2nd wedding anniversary, so I figured this would be a good week to share with you some cupcakes I made for another wedding.

Matt's brother got married in late June and, as you may have seen, our wedding present to his brother and his wife was the wedding cake.  Well, not exactly.  Instead of a cake, they decided to serve tons of mini cupcakes.

Bar Snack (Beer, Pretzel, Chocolate, and Caramel) Cupcakes

Beer and pretzels: a classic combination and for good reason.  There's nothing quite like the pairing of a refreshing, smooth, and slightly pint and the salty, satisfying crunch of pretzels.  Recently, I've been seeing this pair pop up outside of the bar, and these cupcakes aren't the first instance of it.

My first experience with beer and pretzels in a sweet was NYC's own Liddabit Sweets' beer and pretzel caramels.  Made with a blend of Brooklyn Brewery's Brown Ale and East India Pale Ale, this treat is the perfect amalgamation of pretzels suspended in a sweet, salty, and beer-y base.  (Unbeknownst to me until just yesterday, Liddabit also makes something called the Slurtle, which are the same caramels topped with chocolate.)  And just the other day I saw a recipe for beer, pretzel, and chocolate marshmallows.  Clearly the combination is a good one otherwise it wouldn't be popping up in so many places.

Vegan Chocolate Cupcakes (with lots of variations)

This one's been in the works for a while.  I've gotten a number of requests over the years for an egg-free cupcake but I never bothered with it because the demand wasn't all that great.  But last month, I had a reason to finally give it a shot.

Let me back up a bit.  Egg-free cake?  Why not fully vegan?  A lot of people I know who are vegetarian don't eat eggs, but they're ok with milk and other dairy.  And those were the folks requesting egg-free cakes.   But I figured that if I were going to make an egg-free cake, I may as well just go fully vegan as I had also gotten a few requests for vegan cake recipes.

Double Chocolate Cupcakes

Sorry I've been so absent...life has been really hectic and I have lots to share, which I'll get around to doing next week.

In the meantime, I'll tide you over with these double chocolate cupcakes. So, you know how I really don't like chocolate cake? Well, I think these cupcakes have made me a believer. I've tried out dozens of chocolate cake/cupcake recipes over the past few years but I've hated them all. This time, I decided to just use my own recipe and the result was chocolate cupcake perfection. I'm not quite sure how it happened, but somehow it did, and the result is a moist, not too dense but not too light, slightly rich, and perfectly chocolatey cupcake. I just might have to make them again.

Perfect Vanilla Cupcakes

I’m not feeling so good today (I’m convinced I caught something while riding the nasty Greyhound bus earlier this week), so I’m going to keep this short.

I’ve tried lots of different vanilla cupcake recipes, including the three that most people consider to be the best: Martha Stewart, Amy Sedaris, and Buttercup Bakeshop. However, I’ve never been fully satisfied with them, mostly because the texture wasn’t right (a little too dry and coarse-crumbed for my taste).

White Chocolate Cupcakes with Strawberry Buttercream Frosting

There’s really not much of a story on these cupcakes – they were made as per a friend’s request for his 30th birthday. I sent him an email listing all the possible flavors of cake and frosting I could make. He picked white chocolate, vanilla, lemon, and strawberry, and I decided on white chocolate cupcakes with strawberry frosting.

Most white chocolate cakes and cupcakes are very dense (which is why I generally dislike them), so I made sure to make these cupcakes light and soft (yogurt is my new best friend when making cupcakes). The frosting is a standard Swiss meringue buttercream with a thick strawberry reduction added at the end, and the cupcakes were finished off with half of a locally grown strawberry that is small and ruby red and actually tastes like a strawberry.

Brown Sugar-Hazelnut Cupcakes with Blackberry Buttercream Frosting

Update: these cupcakes were selected as one of the 20 best potluck recipes by the New York Times Magazine!  Make sure to check out all 20 recipes and read the related article by Amanda Hesser.


I don’t want to play favorites, but I’m going to have to: this here is my favorite cupcake to date. It’s actually my favorite cake (I’ve made it a few times before), but because I wasn’t in the mood to make a full-out layer cake (nor did I think it would be a good idea to have my favorite cake sitting in my apartment), I decided to just turn the cake into cupcakes.

Lady Baltimore and Lord Baltimore Cupcakes

Tomorrow is a big day in Baltimore – the running of the 133rd Preakness takes place tomorrow evening (and I’m going!). Although this race might not be as glamorous as its counterpart in Kentucky, it’s certainly not devoid of class, refinement, or traditions – you better believe I’ll be wearing a pretty dress, heels, and a big hat decorated with ribbon and flowers, as will countless other women at the event.

And while the Kentucky Derby may have the mint julep, Preakness also has an official drink, and it’s named for Maryland’s state flower: the Black-Eyed Susan. A mixture of vodka, light rum, Cointreau, orange juice, and pineapple juice, the Black-Eyed Susan sounds tasty as an afternoon cocktail (I’ll find out how it tastes tomorrow), but not so much as a cupcake to serve at the pre-Preakness party I’m hosting at my place tomorrow afternoon before my friends and I head up to Pimlico in our sharp attire.

Carrot Cupcakes with Golden Raisin Cream Cheese Frosting

I’ve never been a huge fan of carrot cake, but Matt absolutely loves it – it’s what he gets for his birthday cake every year – so I decided to make some carrot cupcakes for his committee meeting the other day. I’ve eaten plenty of carrot cakes, and I’ve made carrot cake one or two times before, but I wasn’t too thrilled with the end result (I will admit that I am very picky about baked goods). I think my main problems with it are that it is frequently too dense, sweet, and/or oily, and it usually contains nuts and raisins, which makes the cake seem more muffin-like than cakey. Also, the frosting is almost always too sweet for my taste, but that’s usually the case with any frosting on any baked good I’ve ever eaten.

To remedy these problems, I added lots of carrots to the batter to give it natural sweetness and moisture, thereby reducing the amount of oil I would need to use. In a non-traditional move, I added golden raisins (which I hate in the cake itself) to the frosting to give it sweetness and texture without having to use a ton of confectioner’s sugar. It came out way better than I expected and the frosting doesn’t taste like raisins at all; it simply tastes sweet, but not in a cloying sugary way. Also, these are the easiest cupcakes to make – no creaming of butter and sugar and no need for a mixer of any kind (although you will need one for the frosting).

Kiwi Cupcakes with Lime Frosting

Although I’m not really a summer person (I can’t stand the heat!), one of the things I love about summer is the wonderful fresh fruit that it brings: peaches and berries of every variety are abundant and are perfectly juicy and sweet. Unfortunately, fruit in the winter tends to be limited to apples and bananas – blah. However, it’s summer in the southern hemisphere right now, which means that kiwis are plentiful and cheap, to boot.

I recently bought a ton of kiwis with a new cupcake recipe in mind. 

Unfortunately, my first attempt at it was a bit of a failure. Kiwis have a lot of water in them, and their flavor is really subtle, so my addition of a healthy dose of kiwi puree resulted in wobbly cupcakes with a fair amount of kiwi flavor. I decided that the solution would be to reduce the kiwi puree so as to get rid of a lot of the water and intensify the kiwi flavor. 

Perfect Red Velvet Cupcakes

I hate red velvet cake. It looks totally creepy, what with it being a scary shade of deep red, and it doesn’t really taste like very much – I know there’s cocoa in it, but its flavor is rarely discernible. I made some red velvet cupcakes over the summer because they were requested for a party, but I was not satisfied with them – they were not even remotely chocolaty, the color was frightening, and they were a bit dense. 

A few days ago, I wanted to make cupcakes and since I was being stared down by the carton of buttermilk in my fridge, I decided to revisit red velvet cake, albeit with a few revisions in mind. 

An unfortunate cupcake incident, or, how do you turn down bad baked goods?

Those of you who know me well know that I don’t have much of a sweet tooth. Most people (myself included) find that odd, considering that I love to bake. I have always been this way – my aversion to sweets is definitely not something that I developed as an adult in order to avoid calories. On those rare occasions I do eat something sweet, it is something that is amazingly good - chocolates from Jacques Torres, homemade cakes and cupcakes, or confections from Citizen Cake or Pix Patisserie.

Now that you know that about me, let me tell you a little story…

Goodnight Rose Cupcakes (Pistachio Cardamom Cupcakes with Rosewater Meringue Buttercream Frosting)

I was kind of bored the other night and decided that I was going to make interesting cupcakes despite the fact that my beloved KitchenAid mixer has been dead for the past month and its replacement is nowhere in sight. I’ve been on a bit of a rose water kick lately, so I decided to use a combination of flavors that are very common in Indian and Middle Eastern sweets: rose water, pistachio, and cardamom. Because the flavors are so delicate, I decided on a chiffon cupcake, but coming up with the recipe took me a while because I couldn’t find anything decent on which to base mine. After much scientific analysis (ha ha, not really) and studying of other recipes, I came up with these. (The cakes are best within 2 days of baking them – their texture is very delicate and light but they start to lose that quality after a few days.)

These might be my favorite cupcakes that I have made to date - the silkiness of the floral meringue buttercream beautifully complements these delicately fragrant and nutty cupcakes, and the finished product is really just so pretty and perfect for a special occasion (or just a boring Wednesday night).And if you’re wondering about the name, it’s because I’ve been listening to way too much Ryan Adams lately, and I found the name to be perfectly fitting.

Candy Cane Cupcakes

I made these mini cupcakes last week - they were supposed to be taken to my department's holiday party, but I ended up giving them to the bf and his coworkers because I ended up going home due to my not feeling so hot (I''m totally better now, save the for minor congestion).

The cupcakes are simple vanilla cupcakes, recipe courtesy of Amy Sedaris. I don't have the recipes for the frostings with me, but all I did was grind up candy canes in a spice grinder and replace some of the confectioners sugar in the frosting with the candy cane powder (the pink frosting is a vanilla cream cheese frosting, the chocolate frosting is a cocoa frosting made with Ghirardelli cocoa powder). After piping the frosting onto the cupcakes, I topped them off with a sprinkling of crushed candy cane.

Spiked Apple Cider Cupcakes

It’s that time of year when everyone starts pulling out special holiday flavors for their drinks – pumpkin and gingerbread lattes and hot apple cider are practically ubiquitous these days.

One of my favorite holiday drinks is spiced and spiked apple cider. (I love Red Jacket Orchards cider, but I obviously can’t get it down here, so Reid’s Orchards is my very able local substitute.) Good apple cider is wonderful on its own, but one cinnamon stick, a few cloves, a dash of nutmeg, a splash of rum, and a quick trip through the microwave later, it turns into a delicious drink for a cold night. And here it is all dressed up as a cupcake.

Coconut Cupcakes with Ginger-Lime Frosting

I’ve been wanting to try my hand at coconut cupcakes for a while and I had some coconut milk left over from the pumpkin curry I made last week, so I decided to go for it. The cupcakes came out incredibly soft and moist, and the ginger and lime in the frosting were the perfectly tart and tangy twist to top them off. They’re a wonderful way to brighten up a cold and dark almost-winter day.

Pumpkin Cupcakes with Maple-Ginger Frosting

I decided to be a nice co-worker and bring in some cupcakes for the folks in the office. And with Thanksgiving coming up this Thursday, what better than a cupcake rich with the quintessential flavors of fall.

Mango Kulfi Cupcakes

These cupcakes were also on the menu at my party a few weeks ago, and they are by far my favorite cupcake that I make. I’m pretty sure it’s because the combination of cardamom and Alphonso mango is a very typical and traditional combination in Indian sweets, and the pairing of these flavors transports me back to my single-digit years, particularly when my parents would buy me and my brother mango kulfi pops after a Sunday of shopping in Jackson Heights. I also love these cupcakes because they are a delightfully delicious juxtaposition of cultures: traditional Indian flavors presented in an adorably modern American way.