Fourth of July Sparkle & Cupcakes

Congrats Angela and Matt (i.e. Mr. and Mrs. Bryant)! We wish you the best of luck in your new life together. Thank you for letting us be a part of your special day.

Dan and Michelle's Wedding Cake

The gorgeous bride, Michelle, asked us to make a vegan wedding cake and cupcakes to celebrate her and Dan's special day. It was our first vegan request. We searched for a few recipes for both chocolate and vanilla cakes and frostings, modified the recipes to taste and ran multiple kitchen tests to finally get the best combination. We were a tad skeptical on how vegan baking would work, but to our pleasant surprise, everything came out perfectly! Of course, the wedding consultation would not be complete without a complimentary cake tasting for the bride and the groom...and a few of our co-workers (we had to taste them, too)! Alas, we settled on the recipes that we will forever keep in our secret baking book.

This was also the largest order we've had to date. Besides hours of baking and hours of decorating, we also spent hours on building a cupcake stand out of scratch! We were able to find different size pre-cut round wood pieces at a local cake decorating shop and bought a long board of MDF from Home Depot, which we cut into pieces.

(This is Amelia cutting with a kiddo saw attached to a stabilization board. She sure knows how to use a power saw!)

When all the cutting and drilling was complete, we painted all pieces white with Sherwin-Williams Duration Home Interior Acrylic Latex environmentally-preferred paint (It's GreenSure designation - low VOC and low odor formula).

We pre-made all the edible decorations that matched their wedding colors (black, white, green, and purple) and themes (calla lilies, orchids, roses, and lucky bamboo) a week in advance and had them completed by the morning of the wedding. Are we procrastinators? No, we both hold full-time job, so please forgive us :-)

On Thursday evening, we baked a 8-inch cake for the topper. The next day, we baked 100 cupcakes and covered the cake with fondant. Then we loaded all the delicious cakes/cupcakes and all he supplies we needed to complete the centerpiece at the venue in a car and drove to Albany, Ore. for a night. On a bright and early Saturday morning, we drove to The Inn at Diamond Woods in Monroe, Ore. for the Bowden's wedding ceremony and reception.

When we arrived there, we anticipated working in a kitchen or least a large countertop space to make the fresh frosting for the cupcakes. The event coordinators directed us to a small corner in the reception area where the cake would actually be set on a display table. There wasn't a lot of working space, so Amelia took a chair from the reception space outside to place her vibrant red Kitchen Aid stand mixer to make all the frosting (a bit of flour, powdered sugar and cocoa all spilled onto the floor to eventually get cleaned), while Clarissa struggled to assemble the cake stand (the holes on boards didn't align properly - blame Amelia's bad drilling skills!)

We glued all the ribbon bows onto the cupcake liners, placed a decoration on each of them and arranged them on the stand. The centerpiece turned out perfectly, despite our race against the clock (3.5 hours! It was completed 20 minutes before the wedding ceremony started). We felt like we were on Food Network's Cupcake Wars, sans the camera and judges.

Amelia is such a sweet-tooth person. Naturally, she isn't a huge fan of specialty desserts, but she was proven wrong in this case! The couple said earlier, nobody would notice the difference, it was indeed true! We were able to trick their guests into thinking these were regular cupcakes, the carb-loaded ones, and for us, that was a great sense of relief and success!

Thank you Dan and Michelle for having us to be a part of your wedding! We were absolutely honored to make an important centerpiece for your special day.

Little Baby Feet Cupcakes

Mom-to-be Brandy had her fall themed baby shower with an initmate group of co-workers and friends. These gluten-free chocolate cupcakes with chocolate frosting were topped with fall cut outs of fondant baby feet was perfect for the expectant mother who wanted to keep the sex of her baby a surprise. Congratulations to Brandy and her family!

Cupcake Pops

For Suzzanna's 43rd birthday, we decided to surprise her with something sweet that was different from our traditional birthday cupcakes. As we mentioned in our last post about us meeting Bakerella, we were inspired by her creativity and decided to make our very first cupcake pops.



We followed the instructions in Cake Pops by Bakerella. It wasn't so simple at first. Our chocolate candy coats did not melt as uniformly as we hoped for. The troubleshooting section of the book instructed us to add vegetable oil or shortening to liquify the chocolate. If you are on oil-free diet, don't read this part: we might've have added 1/3 cup of oil into 8 oz of candy coats. Yikes! However, the result was smooth and cute cupcake pops!



The very happy birthday lady with her cupcake pop. The cupcake pop is actually not this big, just an angle of the camera makes it disproportional (although no one would complain about a bigger piece of cake, right?)

Sparkling Hot Pink Cupcakes

We made a dozen yellow butter cupcakes, topped with hot pink buttercream, sprinkled with Wilton silver stars edible glitter, and topped with a "C" shaped fondant piece for Cammie's 24th birthday. Happy birthday, indeed!

Housekeeping Cupcakes

Amelia's supervisor, Kalli, got promoted to assistant director in housekeeping at the Ritz Carlton in Philadelphia. To celebrate her promotion and also bid a farewell, we made her a half-dozen vanilla cupcakes with white chocolate frosting. All the toppings were housekeeping related: broom, cart, spray bottle, towel, vaccum, and Marriott Hotels and Resorts logo.

Bird Theme Baby Shower

A good friend, Carmin, hosted a baby shower and asked if we could make chocolate cupcakes for her long-time friend who is expecting her first child, a girl, this summer. Carmin didn't provide a specific color, theme, or ideas for the cupcakes. Bascially she said, "You are so talented, I trust what you can come up with." And then she added, "I was wondering if you know how to make cupcakes that are gluten free?" Thank you Carmin for making our brains work harder!


Mom-to-be Amy was registered at Target and that was how we found out the baby's nursery room theme: birds. We googled for bird theme cupcakes on Cake Central. The website is the best place to look if you need ideas for your cake. It is also a community center for cake decorating and non-cake decorating folks. We share advice, ideas and recipes. Now, isn't that sweet?

Speaking of the cupcakes, these were chocolate and gluten-free chocolate. Thank you Betty Crocker for one of the most simplest methods (all in a box) to make gluten-free goodies. Actually, the cake mix we bought was to make a yellow cake. We adjusted it by adding dutch cocoa into the mixture. We handmade the cupcake wrappers by using reversible polka dot gift wrap from Target. All you need is to print a cupcake wrap pattern and use scallopped craft scissor to cut the top edge and then attach both sides with double-sided tape.

We used our Cricut (Have you seen Cricut Cake? It is specifically made for cake decorating = awesome!) to get a bird and twig pattern. All birds and twigs were hand-cut with fondant by us!

Some of us prefer vanilla cake, we couldn't resist to include a small cake on the top. This was a vanilla cake with strawberry filling. The colors are perfect for a baby girl.

A display of the cake and cupcakes at the shower.

There was quite the spread of good food. All of us ladies had a great time eating, playing fun and silly games and socializing. Amy (and baby Sylvie) were undoubtedly showered with lots of love from all of us!

Festive Cupcakes

We made these simple birthday cupcakes for Clarissa's co-workers, Michelle and Ventura. These vanilla cupcakes with colorful white chocolate frosting were simply delicious!

Happy Valentine's Day

Do you have any special plans for your loved one? Maybe the traditional approach of giving a box of chocolates makes your sweet one smile. But a few more sweet treats wouldn't hurt, right?

We would like to share what we made for this Valentine's day: Red velvet mini cupcakes with cream cheese, sugar cookies, and white chocolate dipped shortbread cookies - all with a Valentine touch.

Happy Valentine's Day!

A secret tool for cupcakes!

The secret is an ice cream scoop (surprise!).

The scoop is used to accurately measure out cake mix into cupcake pans. A standard size ice cream scoop (with a "plus" is what I defined as a "little extra") is enough to fill your standard cupcake pans to the required 2/3 for uniform cupcakes. This trade secret will also eliminate the need for visual measurement to accurately fill each cup (and the resulting mess from leaking while pouring and eyeballing your work at the same time). It is available in graduated sizes that work for mini cupcakes or jumbo cupcakes, but choose one with a release mechanism for convenience.

Our first order! Black and white theme cupcakes

This is our largest cupcake order yet. 40 of them! The clients requested a black and white theme for their shared cocktail birthday party. We were gladly to take the job to make their birthday special. They didn't know what we were planning to do...

Do you like this vintage moss green stove?

We spent a day making marshmallow fondant. Have you ever tried it? It tastes much better than Wilton ready-to-use fondant. Half the fondant was dyed black. We cut various sizes of hydrangeas and stamped tokens and added the final touch with edible pearl shimmer dust on the white decorations.

Chocolate cupcake with chocolate buttercream.

White cupcake with vanilla buttercream.

Perfect photo-op time!

Custom made flag for birthday girls

Isn't it pretty when they sit on the cupcake tower? Almost too beautiful to eat...

Kara's Cupcakes

When we were in San Francisco, we had to stop by Kara's Cupcakes in Ghirardelli Square for a sneak peak at their "sophisticated twist on an old fashioned favorite cupcakes."

You can select from any of 14 cupcake/filled cupcake flavors, each topped with a sugar decoration. Your selected cupcakes are packed in a gorgeous custom pink box!

The lesson is this: Whenever you are at the Fisherman's Wharf for a festive seafood meal, walk a few blocks to Ghirardelli Square for a desert at Kara's Cupcakes.

Chocolate ganche filled cupcakes

Lately we haven't have any special events for us to bake our goodies. However, one of our coworkers was going to move across the country (hiya New York!!!) so we used this as the perfect excuse to bake something good. Here are his farewell treats:

Yellow cupcakes with white chocolate ganche filling and white chocolate buttercream.

Chocolate cupcakes with chocolate ganche filling and chocolate buttercream.


We made these flags by printing letters on colorful cardstock and then taping a toothpick on each letter.
Have fun in New York, Jacob!