Sunday, March 31, 2013

Our (not so great) Easter

By Vicky Nardone
So as Easter's go, this one was not so great.  It started being not so great last night around 2am when Matt got the flu.  He had the chills and spent a good majority of the night shaking.  Needless to say neither of us had a very good night's sleep and my Easter started out with a trip to the grocery store to buy a combo pack of dayquil and nyquil for him.

We had plans to go to my cousin's for Easter and then our friend Bryan also invited us to go to a Dr. Who brunch before that to watch the first episode of the new season.  I had told my cousin I would bring cupcakes to her house and I figured I would grab a couple of the extras and bring them to Bryan's before hand.  I got slightly over ambitious with the cupcakes especially since I had to work Friday night and a good portion of the day on Saturday and told my mom and Matt that I would make both of their favorite kinds (chocolate mint and chocolate chip cookie dough).  Plus I wanted to try making a new kind and I saw some cherry limeade cupcakes at a linky party this week and decided to make those.  I didn't get started making the cupcakes until almost 8 or 9 pm last night and decided to wait until the morning to frost them.

So most of my morning was spent making three different types of frosting to finish up the cupcakes.  Above is what I'll call the "before" picture pretty much right after I finished frosting them.  Matt had taken his dayquil at this point and had decided he wanted to try to make it to brunch at Bryan's but pretty much right around the time that I took the above picture, I started to feel sick.  I was starting to feel a headache come on and I was a little bit congested.  I took an aspirin and we got ready and powered through it.

The brunch at Bryan's actually went pretty well.  The new episode of Dr. Who was good and Bryan made a great breakfast for us.  By the end though, Matt's meds were wearing off and he started to go down hill so we decided I'd drop him off at home before continuing on to my cousin's.  On the way back to our house, I stopped at a stop light a little too quickly and my cupcakes went all over the place in their carrier.  I was so upset.  They were salvageable but they didn't look nearly as nice as the do in the the picture above.  I didn't think to take an after picture at that point because I was already late to my cousin's by the time I dropped Matt off at home.

The second brunch at my cousin's was also nice, but by the time I left there my head was pounding.  Matt had pretty much slept the whole time I was gone and then we both slept another 4 or 5 hours once I got home.  My headache is finally gone but I still feel congested so we'll see how I'm doing tomorrow.  Poor Matt is really down for the count though.  He thinks he's going to be able to work tomorrow but I'm not so sure about that.

Anyway, if you made it this far, I've provided links for the chocolate chip cookie dough cupcakes and chocolate mint and a recipe for the cherry limeade cupcakes.

The chocolate chip cookie dough cupcakes are Matt's favorite.  I blogged about how to make them in a previous post here.

The chocolate mint cupcakes are my mom's favorites.  I pretty much used the recipe verbatim from Mel's Kitchen Cafe.

The cherry limeade were my new ones.  I was inspired by these from HomeInTheFingerlakes.com, but my recipe is quite a bit different from hers.  Her's calls for a boxed cake mix and when I've tried those in the past I've always found the cupcakes to fall apart too easily so I've modified my go to cupcake recipe for these.

Cupcakes

Ingredients 

  • 1 1/4 Cups Flour
  • 5/6 Cup Sugar (1/2 + 1/3)
  • 1/3 Cup Shortening
  • 5/8 Cup milk ( 1/2 + 1/8)
  • 1 3/4 teaspoons baking powder
  • 1/2 teaspoon of salt
  • 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla
  • 3 egg whites
  • Generous spoonful of lime yogurt
  • 1/4 cup lime juice
  • 2-3 drops green food coloring
  1.  Heat oven to 350 degrees.  Grease bottom and sides of cupcake pans or line with paper cups.
  2. Either use an electric mixer or stand mixer to beat all ingredients besides the egg whites until mix is smooth.  Add the egg whites and beat again until all ingredients are well mixed.
  3. Put the batter in the muffin cups.
  4. If you're using mini muffin cups bake between 10 and 15 minutes, otherwise 20 to 25 minutes.  Cupcakes are done when a toothpick comes out cleanly.
Icing
Ingredients

  • 8 tablespoons (1 stick) of butter softened
  • One 8 oz package of cream cheese softened
  • 1 cup of confectioners sugar
  • 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla extract
  • Cherry flavoring packet or extract
  1. Beat the butter and cream cheese with an electric or standing mixer until smooth - around 3 minutes
  2. Add the confectioners sugar and then again beat until smooth.
  3. Add the vanilla and keep beating.
  4. Add the cherry flavoring and mix in.  If you didn't go with a flavor packet, then you might want to add a couple drops of red food coloring for color.
 I iced the cupcakes with my frosting gun, but if you don't have one, just use a knife. I topped these with a maraschino cherry.

Hope your Easter was better than ours!

Linking up to:
Sumo's Sweet Stuff Keeping It SimpleFeeding BigLil\'Luna

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