Cupcakes les Deux

Because Canada Day was on a Thursday this year, work was fairly slow today. The solution to boredom? That would be baking cupcakes. The flavors that won out were chocolate mayonnaise from How to Eat a Cupcake and Key Lime.

The chocolate ones are never a let down and stay super moist and chocolatey (I did add extra melted chocolate and some cocoa) and I made chocolate buttercream icing rather than the chocolate glaze as suggested on Cassie's site.

As for the key lime, we had mass amounts of limes for beer. The icing is a lime cream cheese almost glaze rather than icing in consistancy and I topped it with some candied lime zest. I was told that they were quite possibly the best cupcakes someone's ever had. There was one woman who came in to buy some of the lemon drop cupcakes I made earlier in the week because she thought they were amazing but we were out, so she bought a bunch of these ones instead and seemed quite happy about it.

I'll be taking some to a barbecue tomorrow to test them out so we'll see what the verdict is.

The whole wheat maple banana bread is my go-to for banana breads. There's no story for it, I just needed something for my Dad's morning snack at work and it does look rather tasty non? I always sprinkly sugar in the raw on top for a little bit of extra crunch.

A backlog of baked goods.

A bunch of my friends have birthdays in December, so to celebrate and please both the chocolate and vanilla lovers I made marble cupcakes. I used my go to recipe for marble cakes (more like a pound cake). They were tender and moist and even better on the second day.

I was also cleaning out my digital camera and came across these lovely pictures. Aparantly I forgot to import them which is a shame really. I'm pretty sure these are my infamous pumpkin cinnamon buns aka the best cinnamon buns I have ever made. I only make them in the fall because it seems weird to do something that has pumpkin in it outside of harvest season. It' like making a buche de noel in the middle of summer, but they're lovely! They proofed perfectly, the pumpkin gave it a nice golden brown colour and they were nice and tender even after a couple days (which you know can get shifty when it comes to yeasted breads) Check out flickr to see a picture of them with icing.

Lastly I made some apricot date squares for work for a party. We didn't have enough dates for a complete recipe of my usual date squares, so I pulled out my Taste of Home Cookies since I knew there was a recipe for some apricoty bars. They were fairly easy to put together, not quite as much oats as your typical date square-a little more on the shortbread side if you will. They topping is a little messy while eating, but only really tasty things are.