Foodies,
Today I got a boss of a challenge to my manly culinary self – I was asked to make use my baking skills to make a bachelorette treat for a bus tour going to Niagara wine country tomorrow that I’ll be on with the iYellow Wine Club.
It’s usually my custom to bake a bunch of goodies like cookies or muffins for the bus trip in. Once I even got fancy and made some nice Whisky Bread Pudding Squares. But this is the first time I’ve ever been asked to make something specifically for a bachelorette theme.
So going for the obvious stereotypes, I decided on the visual of a pink cupcake first and then the flavor later. I stopped by the local Michael’s arts and crafts store and picked up some pink decorating sugar and pink sugar pearls. Then I went to a grocery store and picked up some cake flour and pastel baking cups.
When I got home, inspiration finally hit me. Not only did the cupcakes need to be pink, I had to make them boozy as well for the bachelorette party. So I decided to make some Hard Pink Cherry Lemonade Cupcakes loaded with booze.
First step: Make a Limoncello flavored cupcake as the base. I made a standard vanilla cupcake but omitted half the required milk and substituted in my homemade limoncello instead. For those that didn’t read that thread, I made it by soaking the peels of 12 organic lemons in 1 1/2 cups cherry kirsch and 1 1/2 cups of Italian plum brandy. I also added in the juice of one fresh lemon for an extra lemon kick. I ended up with 37 standard cupcake bases.
Second step: The frosting, of course. I made a standard buttercream frosting from butter and icing sugar but instead of using milk to thin it out, I poured in the remainder of the Amarone I used to make my Amarone Risotto for my recent tasting menu which I wrote about in another thread and then added in some homemade Cherry Marnier (which I wrote about in my homemade Marnier thread in the Beer & Spirits forum) plus a little bit of homemade vanilla extract. Voila, boozy cherry buttercream icing.
Third step: the decorating. I use a great frosting pump gun that I got from Williams-Sonoma which I love using. So much better than a standard icing bag. I used a standard star tip and covered the top of each cupcake with 9 star rosettes to completely ice each cupcake. Then I topped each with the sprinkled pink sugar and the pink sugar pearls. The former was easy as pie as it came in a standard spice shaker bottle for packaging. The latter was surprisingly difficult and time consuming to do as I had to sprinkle the sugar pearls by hand to make sure they didn’t clump together in one spot and were spread out on each cupcake.
The end result is a surprisingly pretty cupcake fit for a bachelorette and a severe hit to my manhood as my estrogen levels shot way up. I can’t believe I just made pink bachelorette cupcakes. ![[shock.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/0/0b1dcf699ec319f43254f92e3f145786dcd93904.gif "shock"){kind=small}
Ah well, at least I used some boss Amarone in them. Hope the bride to be enjoys them tomorrow.
