Mini Brownie Cupcakes

As much as I love pastry, it just can't pay my bills yet, so by day I work in GIS doing nerdy geo-stuff for a small training and consulting company. This week, all of my co-workers were able to get together (which is a rare occurrence, because we are all off at different sites and in different cities). They have got to be one of the most awesome groups of people I've ever had the privilege to work with. So, to celebrate the occasion, I baked them goodies!

I decided on miniature brownie cupcakes because they're cute, bite-size, and fun to decorate. Also, I love making these brownies because they are so gooey and delicious and you can't even tell that they're gluten-free! I dipped them in some of my trusty dark chocolate ganache and topped them off with some vanilla buttercream and rainbow nonpareils.

So much fun and so tasty!

Cupcakes Make Everything Better!

Today is Memorial Day, but it's also my dad's birthday. In lieu of a birthday gift this year (I never know what to buy him anyway), I decided to bake some cupcakes - which is way better than some store bought cake anyhow.

I saw Chockylit's recipe for chocolate cupcakes stuffed with strawberry chocolate ganache and frosted with chocolate glaze and buttercream and I was in love.



The cupcakes came out sunken in the middle, which created a bit of a predicament when trying to fill them. In the end, I decided to just pour the filling into the sunken middles instead of cutting off the tops. But they were so messy and somewhat ugly that I decided to use a store-bought cake mix for a second batch. The results? The store-bought ones look pretty, but the from-scratch recipe tastes SO much better! My family loved them. They are the first thing I have baked that wasn't gluten free in a year and a half (the store-bought mix, anyway).