"Watermelon" Cupcakes

So every year, I go to my best friends' house to celebrate the 4th of July (and pretty much every other holiday where family get-togethers are the norm). Her entire family is there - both her side and her significant others' side of the family and they have all welcomed us as part of their extended family. Perfect, considering my whole family lives in central Michigan and my husbands' family is in central Ohio. A few years back, I made the mistake of bringing a simple, festive little strawberry lemonade poke cake and since then, I am the resident baker for EVERY get-together we have... Not such a bad thing, except when you are pretty competitive - even with yourself and feel the need to "1-up" yourself every damn time you have to do something.. so.. it's getting increasingly more difficult to come up with new ideas. Enter Pinterest. I found this gem a few weeks back and thought it might be a good change-up from my usual red, white, and blue sprinkled fancy cookies or flag replica sheet cake. The only problem with this pin? No recipe. If you click on it, it takes you nowhere.. it is just a picture. So, I decided to just make it on my own - I mean, it looks pretty straight-forward.

I love to bake, but have yet to find a white cake recipe that doesn't taste like flour and isn't dry as hell. I took to allrecipes.com and found one that had pretty good ratings/reviews, so here it is, with a few minor adjustments. If you want to see the original recipe, click here.

Gathered up all of my ingredients and got to work. *Note* this recipe would probably be a serious bitch if you don't have some kind of mixer.. As I said, I made a few adjustments, so here is the recipe as I prepared it:

1 1/4c white sugar
1/2c (1 stick) butter
2 eggs
1tbsp vanilla extract
1tbsp almond extract
1 1/2c flour
1 3/4tsp baking powder
1 1/4c whole milk
1 tsp food coloring (I use Wilton gel food coloring and I used the color, Rose - you can use more or less, depending on the color you're going for)
1 bag mini chocolate chips

1. Preheat oven to 350*

2. In your mixer, cream the butter and sugar together until it is super fluffy - seriously - like 5 minutes.

3. While the butter and sugar are going, SIFT together your flour and baking powder in a separate bowl.

4. Add in one egg at a time to your butter/sugar mixture and beat well between each egg (2-3 minutes each).

5. Add vanilla and almond extract to butter mixture. By now it should look kind of fluffy and everything should be fully incorporated like this:

6. Add the flour mixture to the butter mixture and incorporate completely - don't add the flour mixture all at once.. add about 1/3 at a time. It should look like this:

Not much different, but it will be a bit drier than the butter mixture alone.

7. At this point, I added in my food coloring, but didn't mix it in. I put in 3/4c of milk and mixed it altogether, then added the last 1/2c of milk and mixed. You should probably scrape the bowl once or twice during this, otherwise there will be uncolored cake batter at the bottom of the bowl, which will result in some funky-lookin cakes. Once the milk and coloring was completely incorporated (no weird pink streaks or white chunks anywhere..), I threw in some mini chocolate chips (no measuring.. I probably used about 1/3 of the bag), and stirred, rather than beat them in. Ta-da! Finished batter!

8. Spoon the batter into the pan (with cupcake wrappers..) and filled them about half-way.

And baked them for 22 minutes. Since the whole bowl made 24 cupcakes, I had some time to kill.. while I was baking the first batch, I attempted cleaning up my kitchen... but that proved futile, since my dishwasher was full and I HAAAAATE hand-washing dishes... While the second batch was baking, I decided to play with the dog.. Which was pretty much me yelling baby-talk at her, squeaking her toy like crazy, and throwing said toy.. Only to have to retrieve the toy and start all over.. This is the face she gave me the entire time:

Then I thought she was going to play because she took the toy away from me and decided to take a nap instead..

Leave me the F alone, she says. Or at least that's what I got out of the face she was giving me..

Anyhoo... back to the cupcakes.. When they were completely baked, they looked like this:

I understand there are only 20 cupcakes.. and that I made 24... two were sacrificed to my kids, who may or may not have chewed my kneecaps off if i didn't share.. the other two are a complete mystery... said every fat kid that has ever sneaked food.

For the frosting, I was lazy... I usually make a pretty killer buttercream, but I did not have the ambition to make it today, and good thing, too... I was out of powdered sugar anyway... Plus, I always have a jubilee of canned frosting on hand.. sort of addicted to graham crackers/animal crackers dipped in the stuff.. If you DO want to make your own frosting, this one is perfect for cupcakes and for piping borders on cakes.. If you want a more authentic buttercream flavor, sub half the shortening with softened, unsalted butter - straight butter usually melts into a big disaster and doesn't make amazing icing.. the shortening holds up better than butter.

I didn't get a chance to take a pictures of the frosting process, but basically, I just put the canned frosting into my mixer with Wilton Leaf Green gel food coloring and beat until it was colored throughout...

You can really frost these any way you want - knife or piping bag and tip, but I went with the piping bag to try and make it as close to the Pinterest picture as possible. I used a disposable piping bag and Wilton piping tip #24 and iced from the outside of the cupcake, in. After that, just added a few mini chocolate chips!

Ok. Now that I've tasted them, here are some things I would probably change next time:

1. It's not bad, but I think next time I'll use milk chocolate chips instead of semi-sweet (all I could find that day..) because the semi-sweet are sort of over-powering against the cake.

2. The cake itself has a great consistency, but it's not too sweet. I think my overly sweet canned frosting kind of makes up for that, though...

3. Will make sure to fill the cupcake wrappers a bit more - this recipe rises, but not as much as I'm used to cake rising.. Maybe I will try adding 2tsp of baking powder next time, too..

4. Canned frosting was a bad idea, as far as appearance goes.. It doesn't hold it's shape, so combined with the shallow cupcakes, their overall appearance was a little short...

If you have a recipe you'd like me to try, email/comment and I'll add it to the list.. Later this week, I'm going to get those chicken enchiladas put up here and probably my super-easy fail-proof salsa recipe. I don't really have a witty way to end this entry, so I'm just going to stop writing..