birthday cupcakes: earl grey tea (aka london fog) cupcakes

My sister's birthday was back in September and she chose Earl Grey as her birthday cupcake flavour and I was pretty excited to get baking. I already had a great Earl Grey buttercream recipe (why is everyone surprised by that?) so I figured it would be pretty simple to create a cupcake recipe around this.

These turned out pretty awesome - the subtle flavour of Earl Grey got stronger after sitting for a day, so when Suzy picked them up, they were pretty good. The best thing is that she really enjoyed them - at a rate of one cupcake a day.  :)

I also loved the cute cupcake papers I found for these Earl Grey cupcakes - they were a pretty blue with pink flowers - perfect for a tea party!

I also like to refer to these as London Fog cupcakes. One of my favourite drinks is the London Fog - a drink created in Vancouver, Canada that incorporates Earl Grey tea, vanilla and milk - very much like these cupcakes!

birthday cupcakes: cherry cola cupcakes

Paul is a HUGE fan of Cherry Coke. Actually, he's a huge fan of Cherry Coke, Cherry Coke Zero, Vanilla Coke and Vanilla Coke Zero. All of which are tough to find here in Toronto (some convenience stores sell individual cans, but it's next to impossible to buy these by the case at a reasonable price). So whenever someone we know makes a trip to the US and offers to pick up something for us, we often ask for pop.

Recently, my co-worker was kind enough to bring Paul back a case of Cherry Coke and for his birthday, Paul chose Cherry Coke as his flavour of choice for his birthday cupcakes.

birthday cupcakes: frothy beer cupcakes

I wasn't all that surprised when Paul's brother, Mike, chose "beer" as his birthday cupcake flavour - Mike is a big fan of beer. I wasn't sure how beer would translate into a cupcake recipe, but he chose his flavour and stuck by it, so off I went in search of inspiration.

There weren't too many beer cupcake recipes on the internet (I was actually mildly surprised by this) but I did manage to find a few, and using them as inspiration, I whipped up my own version of beer cupcakes.

For the frosting, I took my go-to classic buttercream recipe (I've had fantastic results using this recipe as a base for pretty much any flavour I can think of) and added in beer. Instead of fancy piping (I had decided that manly beer cupcakes shouldn't have fancy-schmancy piped frosting) I used an ice cream scooper to place a large "plop" of frosting on each cupcake. Mike said it reminded him of the foam on top of a frosty mug of beer (hooray!), hence I named these "frothy beer cupcakes".

I have to say that these were the lightest cupcakes I've made in the "birthday cupcake" series. I think the beer added lightness to the batter. They have a subtle, but unmistakeable beer taste and the frosting adds another layer of beer flavour.

You can probably use any beer to make these cupcakes, but I'd recommend sticking to "lighter" beers, like white beers, pale lagers, etc. Something like Guinness might be too heavy and the recipe would probably need to be tweaked to handle that. I used Molson Canadian because we always have a lot of that hanging around.

On a side note, my mom, who doesn't drink beer at all and rarely eats sweets, made 3 of these cupcakes "disappear" over the weekend. I definitely need to make more of these soon!

birthday cupcakes: lemon curd cupcakes

My mother-in-law chose "lemon pudding" as her birthday cupcake flavour, which really put my mind into a tailspin. Lemon pudding? In a cupcake? How the heck was I supposed to achieve that?

And then, inspiration just dropped into my lap. Actually, it was delivered to my front door in the form of Mackays. You see, the lovely folks from Mackays over in Scotland have put out a #bakingwithmackays challenge to food bloggers and I was lucky enough to be sent a package of their goodies to experiment with. One of the lovely jars I received was their Lemon Curd.

So, confession time - I've never had lemon curd before. I may have had it in a dessert at some point, but if so, I don't remember. So I wasn't sure what it would taste like when I opened up the jar, but I was hoping it would be a suitable lemon flavour to base a cupcake around. Oh. My. God. This stuff is AWESOME! I ate about 3 huge spoonfuls before I had to remind myself that I needed some to bake with. But seriously, where has lemon curd been all my life?

Obviously, you can substitute any lemon curd into this cupcake (or even a different flavoured curd), but for me, it's pretty much always going to be Mackays Lemon Curd (unless of course, it's their Lime Curd...oooohhhh).

birthday cupcakes: chocolate Nutella cupcakes

Both my brother-in-law, Dave, and my sister-in-law, Alex, answered with an emphatic "chocolate" when I asked them what flavour they wanted their birthday cupcakes to be.

After a little more thought, Alex added that she wouldn't mind Nutella cupcakes either. Since I was delivering the cupcakes to both of them on the same weekend, I decided to cheat a little and bake them both chocolate Nutella cupcakes. 

I never ended up eating any of these cupcakes, although I did have a few mini bites made with the leftover batter. I did, however, get lots of comments from the ones that did get to eat the cupcakes so I have a fairly good idea of how they turned out.

birthday cupcakes: Crown Royal whiskey cupcakes (aka Boozy Cupcakes)

I never gave my father-in-law a chance to choose his birthday cupcake flavour - it was always going to be Crown Royal cupcakes.

You see, many years ago, when Paul and I were still dating, I gave a bottle of Crown Royal Canadian whiskey to his dad for Christmas after Paul told me it was his favourite. The tradition was born. Ever since, I have gifted Paul's dad with a bottle of Crown Royal every Christmas.

Many bottles of Crown Royal later, I didn't hesitate that this would be the flavour to kick off my birthday cupcake series.

birthday cupcakes for the family

Earlier this year, I had the crazy idea to bake cupcakes for each of my close family members on their birthday. But, not just any cupcakes - these were going to be special birthday cupcakes based on a flavour that was either requested by them or chosen by me based on what I think they'd enjoy.

This was going to be a great learning experience for me because...well, first off - I'm not that great at baking cupcakes. They generally come out okay (in other words, edible), but not swoon-worthy. Plus my piping skills are horrible. And I mean horrible, I mean HORRIBLE.

However, since my last cupcake attempt many months ago, I have managed to become a little better at managing my oven (thanks to my macaron experiments), plus I have an amazing buttercream recipe that has become my standard frosting/filling, so I figured this would be a good time to pull out the old cupcake tins and give it another go.

If nothing else, it would make for a fun series of blog posts, right?

So, I hit the store and bought a variety of cute cupcake liners, large frosting tips (I never realized that there were HUGE frosting tips, which I'm hoping would improve my piping skills and pulled out the cupcake carrier I got from Alex (my sister-in-law) at Christmas.

I then announced my plans to my family.

You could hear crickets, I swear.

After they figured out what the heck I was trying to explain ("yes, you get to choose the flavour, but not EXACTLY the flavour, I'm going to INTERPRET the flavour you choose.") they got into the spirit and gamely told me what kind of cupcakes they would like for their birthday.

Some, of course, were easier than others: Chocolate? I can handle that! Beer? Ummm...I think I'll need a few practice batches for that! But overall, I think this is going to be a fun ongoing series of blog posts. I'll be sure to also mention how successful (or not) each recipe was!

Check back soon as I'll start sharing my birthday cupcake series results!