Cookies and Cupcakes from Mother's Day

So I was pretty well burned out after the gigantic cupcake order and didn't really get into doing a lot of cookies for Mother's Day. I had agreed to do a small bouquet for my friend's mom and just held out some of the dough from when I did the beach cookies to do them. And while I was doing those, I cut out a ton of mini flowers to use as decoration on the cupcakes I decided to do for Mother's Day for my mom, grandmother and mother-in-law, because those are so much faster to knock out. Here is a really bad pic of the bouquet my friend and I put together for her mom:

Mother's Day Flower Bouquet

For the cupcakes, I did red velvet with cream cheese frosting and butter yellow with peanut butter buttercream. I used this recipe from the Cake Mix Doctor for the red velvet ones. And for the cream cheese frosting, I ended up just sort of winging it after reading several recipes. I added extra powdered sugar to make it very stiff. This is what I ended up using:

              2 8oz. blocks of cream cheese

              2 sticks of butter (1 cup)

              1T vanilla

              2T milk

              6 cups powdered sugar

For the peanut butter I totally cheated and just used the Duncan Hines butter golden cake mix and then used the Wilton Peanut Butter Buttercream recipe, although I may have had a little extra peanut butter in there, just because I wasn't too precise in my measurements with it, since IMO, one can never have too much peanut butter! ;)  Again, I didn't get a good pic. This one is after they'd traveled over 100 miles and then picked out of the bunch by my cousin and taken to her house while sitting on a paper plate covered with a paper towel. The peanut butter one looks horrible. Oh yeah, I decorated the peanut butter ones with wedges from round chocolate cookies that I had the foresight to cut out while making the flower bouquets. I used an Ateco #828 open star tip for the peanut butter ones, which I'd just bought the day before. 

And do you recall me mentioning my niece who helped me with the Derby cupcakes? Well, she already loved to bake, but now, she's into decorating, too, after that day and the fun we had. I picked up an Ateco #809 and #829 for her and late last night, I got a notification that she'd tagged me in her facebook photo of her baking project from last night. She did 70 minis to take to surprise the 5th graders at Boaz Elementary school, who she'd done her student teaching with this semester (she graduated the day after we did our Derby cupcakes and is now looking for a teaching job). Makes my heart proud!

Elisabeth's cupcakes

 

 

 

And here is her photo compilation of our cupcake making day at the donut shop and her quickly learned petal rose. Check out that ginormous donut!  Ha!

Cupcakes and Donuts with Elisabeth