Iron Cupcake SF # 1

I'm so excited about attending this Thursday's Iron Cupcake - San Francisco. It'll be my first time attending any type of cupcake community gathering. You know, before I ever starting putting my stuff up online, I had no idea how big this cupcake world was. I never even knew there was a cupcake world. I always thought that cupcakes were a U.S. thing but I was so so so wrong. I first discovered Flickr one day as I was surfing the web and I found people from random parts of the world were obsessed with cupcakes. I have never seen cupcakes like the ones I've see just recently. Some of them are so intricately made, they're like works of art. Seriously. And some were made to be more like an appetizer or meal, for example, baking bacon and eggs in the batter and topped with mashed potatoes and corn. It's crazy! Well, after a while I have been experimenting with different flavors and really broadening my cupcake horizon but I'm starting off slow. I'm not really ready to add bacon to my cupcakes. Iron Cupcake is a great way for me to start.

For this months challenge the secret ingredient is Spice. Any spice, all spice, cinnamon spice, ginger spice, posh spice. At first I wanted to do maybe a Gingerbread spice cake with honey cinnamon buttercream but I decided not to. I decided to do a chai spice with white chocolate buttercream because I thought maybe the combination would be delicious. I thought this all up in my head. When my mind isn't on my son, I'm thinking about cupcakes and what new kind of concoction I'm going to bake up next. I baked this new cupcake idea today to test it out and I gave some to friends and they loved it. Or maybe they were just trying to be nice? haha Anyway, even if they were, their lie made me feel happy =) I don't even think anyone reads this blog. Then why do I even bother? I don't know, it's kinda like a journal where you just talk about your day and you just blah blah away because it feels nice. I haven't vented on here yet and I don't know if I plan to. I don't know, we'll see...

Back to baking!

Here are my pretties getting ready to go into the oven. I put my own blend of chai spice in this which contains ginger and cinnamon. I put about 2 teaspoons worth into my white cake batter. After tasting it, I think it could use about half a teaspoon more of the spice.

While waiting for the cakes, I melted some white chocolate and I whipped into my buttercream. I think I had about a pound of buttercream with 8 oz of white chocolate in it. I really wanted to taste that white chocolatey flavor.

Here they are all done. Yes, that is a frying pan behind it. No, I wasn't frying anything while I had this on the stove.

I am seriously working on my piping skills which are nonexistent at the moment. I piped frosting onto these but they were so ugly that I scraped it off and tried again. 

Iron cupcake SF, here we come!