Every year, on Black Friday, instead of going out to fight people for cheap laptops and toaster ovens, our family has a 'Family Fun Day'. This year was the 12th year we've done it. It has transformed over the years, and within the last couple, it has become a tradition for my mom and I to bake on Family Fun Day while the boys work. In addition to the dozens of peanut blossoms and kringla and over a hundred dark chocolate sea salt caramels, we found time to try four different kinds of cupcakes.
The first one we tried was what I was calling a 'Pear Tree' cupcake. It's a pear cake, which is similar in texture to an apple cake. It had a ginger flavor in it as well. The frosting is a dulce de leche butter cream and it's garnished with candied ginger, which is amazing if you've never had it.
The second one we tried was a 'Hot Cocoa' cupcake. The chocolate in the cake batter was 'Swiss Miss' cocoa mix and the baked cupcakes really tasted like hot cocoa versus plain chocolate. I made a marshmallow buttercream for the frosting and garnished it with a little hot cocoa powder and then chocolate-covered marshmallows. It was pretty good, but very rich.
The third one we tried was an 'Eggnog' cupcake. Eggnog is a pretty polarizing flavor, and if you don't like eggnog, you wouldn't like this one. It really tasted like eggnog. The batter had eggnog and rum extract in it and the buttercream on top had more rum and fresh nutmeg. Very tasty.
And the last one we made was a 'Peppermint Stick' cupcake. This one was pretty basic, but I wish I'd taken a picture of the inside of it, because it was pretty. I made my basic vanilla bean cupcake batter and seperated it into two bowls. I added peppermint extract and red food coloring to half of it and then put the batter into two squeeze bottles and swirled it in the papers instead of scooping it. The frosting was a very basic peppermint buttercream and I crushed up some candy canes for the garnish.
All in all, they turned out pretty well I think.
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