Mini Cupcakes

Baby cupcakes are where it's at!

  My son has to start a new day care next week, so this is his last week at this day care. We are so sad, we really like our day care lady, but our new one seems just as nice. We are very lucky.

  Anyway as a treat for the end of day care I asked him if he wanted to make cupcakes to share. And when I say share, he shares but does not eat them. I know, I think he may have been switched at birth, or gotten that from his dads side of the family.  It's an issue, but not much, just more for me really.

  So I decided to make mini cupcakes, that way he had more to decorate, and I would also have some left over to take to work. Win-Win.

  I did the usual cake box mix, again because I am cheap and the kids really like them. I made my own butter cream, and I only needed a little since we were making 2 dozen mini's.

Butter cream for mini cupcakes
covers about 2 dozen

1/4 cup butter
1/4 cup shortening
1 TBSP vanilla*
icing sugar **
milk ***


Mix the butter, shortening and vanilla together, then add icing sugar and milk as needed until you get the volume and consistency you need.

*It may seem like a lot of vanilla, but I like the flavour
**as much as you need to get the amount of icing you want
***and again enough as you need to get the amount you want

  I used Halloween cupcake liners I got at the warehouse sale a while back. I don't think the kids will care if they are theme appropriate, they just want sugar you know.

  I use my small ice cream scoop to make them even. Then pop in the oven for about 10 minutes, until a tooth pick put in the centre comes out clean. Then let them cool.

These are the sprinkles my son picked out, I said go for a Christmas theme.  Most were, except the butterflies, and a few others.

  I made up a few silicon cupcake liners of sprinkles for my son, I let him pick them out. We really don't need much because he is only doing 24 mini cupcakes, but you know, he loves them and why not. I really should support him in his love of the sprinkle, because in the end it enables me to get more.

Isn't he cute?  Please ignore the fact he is wearing his hockey undershirt.

  To set him up, I usually pipe on the icing for him as he gets frustrated with the piping bag, then I put one on a plate and let him go to town. The plate is supposed to catch the sprinkles. It catches some of them.  Sort of.

He must be growing up, he was placing each sprinkle, he used to just dump them on.

  Now when my son is done covering every square millimeter of exposed icing they are almost done, he then has to drop more on top to see if they stick. I think he gets the sprinkle love from me, but the rest, well not sure what happened there.  And I have to say this time he was really reserved, he only put a bit of sprinkles, it was sort of sad.  To know your sprinkle loving little man is growing up.

See here, he is trying to ask me if he can just eat the sprinkles.  I said fine when you are done.

I think after this he was done, he just wanted to eat the sprinkles.  So I did the last two.

  I just pack them up in these plastic clam shells that I get at the warehouse, they are under $.50 a piece; so worth it, the fact that you can just toss them in the recycling bin when you are done is good.

  These are simple and he loves decorating them so much, and the kids get a kick out of it too.

  Nothing fancy but it let me spend some time with my son, which is better than playing x box with him. ( I hate playing x box!) And my friends at work get a nice treat.

Can you tell which two I did?

 My next blog post is going to be awesome, there is alcohol, chocolate and cream cheese involved.  You will die!

Also for some reason people cannot leave comments, I don't know what I did.  I tried to add BlogLuv and goodness knows what I did, hopefully it will be fine with the next post later this week.