I've never actually squeaked like they do in books. You know, the part where the character goes, "eek!" as they stumble upon something surprising or grotesque. Well today that all changed. Deciding to bake some cupcakes today I grabbed my mixer and reached my hand in to pull out the attachments only to let out a high pitched, "eek!" as my hand almost encountered the large spider living therein. I mean I know it's been awhile since I've baked, but that's a bit over the top to have cobwebs and spiders taking up residence in my mixing bowl. Gross.
After calling the hubby in to take care of that mess, I set to making some cupcakes. Not just any cupcakes, but super moist, special cupcakes decorated all fancy like. At least that was how I imagined it in my head.
Before I get ahead of myself, let's just start at the beginning. It all started with a poker player at the casino where I work. He's a super hero fanatic. You can bet that whatever the new movie out is he will have seen it the first day and come in wearing a t-shirt commemorating some character from the movie, complete with a figurine super hero as his card protector. I look forward to seeing which one he will bring in next.
So in honor of one of my favorite poker players I decided to make a cupcake commemorating my favorite super hero, Baby Groot. I saw this super cute pin detailing how to make Groot cupcakes and I couldn't resist.
How to make Groot Cupcakes
Update: either I had a saboteur in the middle of the night or my cookies were too soft. :( this is what I found when I woke up the next morning.
Tips from my mom should you be so daring as too try it out yourself. Chill your dough and your frosting first to make it easier on yourself. Apparently this makes it easier to separate the other dough from your cut out. Also go for a hard cookie so they don't break as easily.
Good luck. Be sure to share your experiences. And just remember, they don't always turn out like you envision but it's still fun to try and you usually learn something for future attempts.
Step 1: Make super moist, awesome cupcakes.
I don't know about you, but my cupcakes always come out dry and there is nothing worse than a dry cupcake. Groot deserved better so I added a couple of things to the store bought cake mix to make my cupcakes extry moist.
There is nothing like saving time, so I spiffed up a cake mix with a few extra items to make it a bit more moist and yummy.
-Add an extra egg, check
-Use melted butter (twice the amount) instead of oil making sure to cool it to room temp first, check
-Use milk instead of water, check
Well that was easy, right? Let me know if any of you have any better suggestions or some tips on this one that I might have missed.
After whipping up the cake mix, I then poured the batter into my lined cupcake tins, all I had were small little heart shaped ones, awwwww. Or some really big circular ones. I opted for the heart shaped ones and started cooking.
Twenty three minutes and an awesome smelling house later I pulled out my first batch of cupcakes and boy did they look good. For the first thirty seconds, then they started collapsing in on themselves. Rut row. What to do now? Any ideas as to why this happened? My best guess is that maybe I whipped the batter too long in the mixer creating too much air in the batter.
Arggg, so much for pretty cupcakes. A little deflated and two batches later, I decided to just pour the rest of the batter into the big circular cupcake tin, making three large cupcakes just to get it over with. Next up, make the shortbread Groot cookies.
Step 2: Make the Groot-shaped shortbread cookies.
You can find a great tutorial for it here.
You can use any recipe for shortbread you want, I used a family recipe. Just butter, sugar, and flour. So fattening, yet so good. I made the dough as usual then floured a cutting board and rolled out my dough to about 1/4" in thickness. Using a picture of baby Groot I printed from the Internet, I used the cut out as a stencil to cut out little baby Groots in the dough.
Easier said than done as I was soon to find out. This step was very tedious and hard to separate from the rest of the dough. It worked better actually to just cut out a cross shape first, transfer it to the cookie sheet and then carve the figure a little better. It was still horribly tedious and I gave up after about seven.
Then throw the cookies into the oven for 20 minutes at 350 degrees.
Step 3: Ice your cupcakes and decorate Groot.
Okay, not gonna lie my baby Groots came out horrible, the cupcakes looked terrible and by this point I was sick and tired of making these things. I found out today that I just don't have the patience for decorating or making super fabulous cupcakes. Maybe if I had broken it down into separate steps on different days I could have done better, but today just sucked.
Luckily for me at least one cupcake and Groot came out okay, but the rest are gonna get trashed. Maybe I will try again when I have a little more patience and perfect these babies. Wish me luck.
Short bread!!!! I want some!
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