Dairy-Free Frosting!

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I recently discovered that I'm slightly lactose intolerant. I can still have milk and dairy product, but I get all bloated. Not fun. It's actually quite sad because nothing goes better with sweets than a tall glass of cold milk.

So I like that Cupcake Project recently published a recipe for Sinless Smooth & Sweet Dairy-Free Chocolate Frosting. This frosting is made from cashews (interesting).

Even though I'm not staying away from dairy products completely, it's nice to know there are options. You can find the recipe HERE.

Easy Chocolate Pumpkin Cupcakes from Picky Palate

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I can't pass up a good pumpkin recipe. I'm a sucker for anything pumpkin and it's definitely that time of year!

Picky Palate recently published a recipe for 2-ingredient Chocolate Pumpkin Cupcakes. Two ingredients?! That's my kind of recipe! All you need is a can of pumpkin and a chocolate cake mix. That's it.

Well, you'll need a few other ingredients if you want to make homemade frosting. And trust me, you'll want to use the one from Picky Palate because it uses brown butter! Yes, I'm seriously making these this weekend.

Neapolitan Cupcakes from Baked Perfection

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What is with my fascination with neapolitan? Three delicious flavors that go together perfectly! I've seen several combination of Neapolitan cupcakes, but I think this is my favorite (probably because it's the easiest).

Baked Perfection posted a recipe for Neapolitan Cupcakes, which uses a chocolate cake mix as the base for the cupcakes. Some recipes use several flavors of cake layered or swirled together. Baked Perfection adds the strawberry and vanilla flavors in the frosting by swirling them together. Easy is always my game. You can find the full recipe here.

Scharffen Berger Chocolate Adventure Contest Winners

At the end of last year I reported on Scharffen Berger Chocolate's Adventure Contest. Entrants submitted an original recipe using Scharffen Berger chocolate and an "adventure" ingredient for a chance to win $20,000 in prizes.

The winners have been announced and the best part is that they published the winning recipes! Interesting to note that all of the winning cupcakes used stout beer. Maybe that tells you something about the judges.

GRAND PRIZE

You Make Me Wanna "Stout" Cupcakes
Elaine Barbee
Adventure ingredient: stout beer

SECOND PLACE
Spicy Dulce de Leche and Chocolate Cream Stout Cucpakes with Chili Ganache and Candied Serrano Chiles
Jennifer Daskevich
Adventure Ingredients: Stout beer, buttermilk, sweetened condensed milk, chili pepper

THIRD PLACE
Beer Bellies (Cocoa-Stout Cupcakes with Beer-Malt Frosting and spicy Pretzel Crumbles
Jennifer Burke
Adventure Ingredients: Stout beer, coconut butter, sweetened condensed milk, chili pepper, Meyer lemon

Chocolate and Pistachio?

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I am not a pistachio fan. Or so I thought. Two years ago I tried a cupcake at the LA Cupcake Challenge with pistachio in it and fell in love. Who knew? I think it's true that as you get older you start to like more foods. Look Mom, I'm maturing!

Sweetest Kitchen posted a recipe for Quadruple Chocolate Pistachio Cupcakes. Now, I'm already liking this recipe because it has the word "quadruple" in it, but I'm also intrigued by the pistachio ingredient. I haven't had a pistachio cupcake since that fateful day two years ago and I think I'm ready to try it again.

The cupcake is made up of:

• Devil's food chocolate cake with Drotse Dutch-processed cocoa powder. Also, 1/4 cup of flour is replaced by pistachios.
• Lindt milk chocolate pistachio truffle filling
• Chocolate olive oil mousse frosting made from 50% Lindt chocolate and 70% Lindt chocolate
• Topping of chopped and finely ground pistachios

Sounds like this cupcake has a great combination of sweet and salty. I think I need to test it out. You can find the recipe here.

Scharffen Berger Chocolate Contest

The Chocolate Adventure Contest: Cupcake Edition 2010

Scharffen Berger Chocolate invites you to summon your spirit of adventure for this year's contest. Create an original cupcake recipe that combines SCHARFFEN BERGER Chocolate and any of the adventure ingredients and enter for a chance to win!

There's $20,000 in prizes and the chance to fly to New York City to bake and share your cupcake from the beloved Sweet Truck. Plus--the winning recipe will appear in the Food Network Magazine. Enter here.




You can get your creative juices flowing by using the interactive cupcake builder to create your cupcake. The cupcake builder will help you get acquainted with the adventure ingredients, thanks to helpful tips from baking guru Alice Medrich.

I recently tried Scharffen Berger Chocolate for the first time and it was delicious! I had a hard time sharing it with my husband, so I hid it. Is that wrong?

The Hotel Hershey

As a kid (and an adult), I've always had the dream of visiting Hershey, Pennsylvania. A city based on chocolate, what could be better than that? They even have an amusement park!

The other day Cupcakes Take The Cake posted about cupcakes from The Hotel Hershey. Sweets offers a large variety of cupcake flavors including Cinnamon French Toast, Chocolate Mudslide, Butterscotch, and Key Lime Pie. Check out the list of flavors on their menu.

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The Hotel Hershey also has a place called The Chocolate Spa, where "chocolate inspires innovative treatments like the Whipped Cocoa Bath, Chocolate Bean Polish, and the Chocolate Fondue Wrap."

Sounds like a dreamy, delicious place.

Chocolate and Pumpkin Pie Shortbread Bars

I wish I had stocked up on canned pumpkin last year, but how was I to know that there would be a pumpkin shortage again this year! I haven't checked my local grocery store lately to see if they have canned pumpkin in stock. But when and if I find some, I will definitely be stocking up because pumpkin desserts are my favorite and it's pumpkin time!

Photo: Picky Palate

Picky Palate posted a recipe for Chocolate and Pumpkin Pie Shortbread Bars. I really want to make these this year! You can find the full recipe and more photos on Picky Palate's website. By the way, she's a genius.

Dipped Cupcakes at Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory

Stopped by Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory the other day to grab a caramel apple (Tiger Butter is the best!) and spotted these Dipped Cupcakes. Although I think the Dipped Cupcakes look more like Ding Dongs, so I'm not sure which is which. Either way, not very appealing to me. Dipping a cupcake is like hiding the taste. Isn't that why chocolate-covered grasshoppers exist? You certainly wouldn't eat a grasshopper any other way.

But I could be completely wrong. Rocky Mountain does have lots of delicious treats. Next time.

Review: Dots Cucpakes

A few months ago I featured Dots Cupcakes as a cupcakery I haven't been to, but really want to try. Yesterday a friend called to tell me that he had some cupcakes for me. Of course I was excited, but especially excited after finding out the cupcakes were from Dots Cupcakes.
I was lucky enough to try two cupcakes from Dots: Chocolate and Red Velvet. Both were delicious! The chocolate had a swirl of caramel on top which gave a normal chocolate cupcake a little something extra. The frosting on the red velvet was just how I like it...great! My only suggestion would be more frosting, but that's just a personal preference. Although I technically tasted Dots Cupcakes, I still plan on visiting one of their Pasadena's store this year. So many flavors that I want/need to try!

P.S. Awesome packaging! Although sometimes overlooked, packaging is a huge part of cupcake buying, which some cupcakeries skimp on. Dots is smart.

Chocolate Cupcakes from Godiva

Photo: Godiva

I've mentioned before that I get my chocolate/sweet tooth from my mom. So it makes sense that my mom was the one who sent me the link to these cupcakes.

Godiva Chocolatier is selling Chocolate Cupcakes on their website. These aren't ordinary chocolate cupcakes. These are filled with Godiva chocolate ganache. Yummy!

The cupcakes are available in a pack of six cupcakes ($28)-- three iced with chocolate buttercream and three with vanilla buttercream. The cupcakes MUST be shipped by overnight shipping. Right now Godiva is offering a free upgrade to overnight shipping, but you still have to pay for standard shipping ($8.95 for a $28.00 item).

I would be pretty excited to receive these and I bet plenty of your family and friends would be too. Christmas gift ideas!

I wonder if they sell these cupcakes in their stores. Have you seen them?

Chocolate Pumpkin Cupcakes with Toasted Meringue Frosting

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I keep hearing rumors of a canned pumpkin shortage, but every time I've visited my Fresh & Easy store in the past two months, the shelves are stocked full. That hasn't stopped me from stocking up on pumpkin. Luckily, it's almost Thanksgiving so I have plenty of opportunities to use my pumpkin.

Cupcake Bake Shop recently posted a recipe for Chocolate Pumpkin Cupcakes with Toasted Meringue Frosting. I've mentioned several times how much I love pumpkin cupcakes, but I have yet to try a cupcake with pumpkin and chocolate. Each cupcake has a mixture of pumpkin batter and chocolate batter. I love the idea of toasting the meringue frosting to give the cupcake a little bit of a crunch.

This is definitely at the top of my list to make for Thanksgiving. Hopefully my oven will be fixed by then!

I'm a Winner!

I'm a recovering chocoholic. I used to eat it every day or would feel awful withdrawals. Luckily, I have overcome my battle and can eat chocolate on occasion without any negative effects.

Last week I entered a giveaway on Cupcake Project's blog to win three chocolate bars. And not just any chocolate, but Amano chocolate. Yesterday I was thrilled to find out that I won!

Thank you to Cupcake Project and Amano Chocolate! I can't wait to receive my chocolate bars!

Cake? Chocolates?

As you can probably tell from all of my raving, I think Bakerella is a baking genius! She just oozes creativity. This may look like a box of chocolates, but it is actually a cake! And the chocolates on top are actually a variation of her famous cupcake bites.


Check out her post to get her detailed instructions of how to make this beautiful dessert. She also included pictures for people like me that need visuals. This is a perfect dessert for Valentine's, if you have the guts to attempt it.

Muddy Buddy Cupcakes

Yesterday was the day that the Cupcake Activists ruled the Muddy Buddy! For the third year in a row, my husband and I competed in the Muddy Buddy. This race consists of a 6-7 mile course of mountain biking and trail running. It is a team race where you leap-frog between riding the bike and running. At the end of the course is a 100-foot mud pit. You have to crawl through the mud pit, on your stomach, to the finish line. We had a great time and even improved our time from the previous year by five minutes! It must have been because we were fueled by cupcakes!
This year we chose the team name "Cupcake Activists." We designed t-shirts (pictures coming soon) and I baked cupcakes. Behold...Muddy Cupcakes!

These cupcakes consisted of a triple chocolate fudge cake, milk chocolate frosting, chocolate graham cracker crumbles, and a gummy worm on top. I was going to use Oreos for the mud, but these graham crackers had a lighter color, closer to the color of mud.

The purpose of being a cupcake activist is to spread the love of cupcakes. I baked plenty of cupcakes to hand out to our fellow racers and friends. After pushing your body for an hour or so, a cupcake was the perfect reward!

My friend's daughter couldn't resist eating the gummy worm first. Who am I kidding?.... I ate the gummy worm first too!

Being covered in mud didn't stop anyone from eating these cupcakes. The good thing was that the cupcakes were the same color as the mud so you couldn't tell when you were eating mud. They were delicious!

I'm already counting down the days until next year's race. I wonder what kind of cupcakes I will make for 2009.

National Chocolate Cupcake Day

Saturday, October 18 is National Chocolate Cupcake Day, according to MSBNC. That got me thinking, how am I going to celebrate? I should probably go to the cupcakery with the best chocolate based cupcake. Will it be:

Bristol Farms - Chocolate Coconut

Whole Foods - Chocolate

Elizabethan Desserts - Monkey Business

SusieCakes - Chocolate Peanut Butter

Sprinkles - Milk Chocolate or Peanut Butter Chocolate

I will let my instincts lead me.

Jumping on the Bandwagon

I got a tip from my sister that Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory was selling cupcakes. Rocky Mountain is one of my favorite places for an indulgent dessert (try the Avalanche Bar!). I was not too surprised to hear this, as cupcakes are definitely the hot trend right now. Stores are adding them to the menu without a second thought. That might actually be a bad move. How great are these cupcakes going to be? Well, the other night I was near the store she visited so I stopped to check them out.Well, they definitely were not gourmet nor were they presented very nicely. But I guess that is why the $1.50 price tag accompanied these cupcakes. My sister said when she stopped in the other night she saw the cupcakes sitting on a counter, directly next to a jar of Pillsbury Chocolate frosting. You would think that a chocolate store would use something special for "their" cupcakes, but it looks like they just wanted to fit in with everyone else.

I didn't buy a cupcake because of my triathlon diet (thank goodness it's over!), but I will try one the next time I am there. I am also curious to see if cupcakes are being sold in all of their stores or just this specific one.