Thursday, November 3, 2011

A Cupcakes Adventure

This October, I spent a lovely day out in Brockton for the wedding of one of my labmates.  In addition to attending, I made them cupcakes!  Actually, I've spent June until now preparing for this: cupcake tastings, learning how to make Swiss buttercream, piping, the whole shebang. 

Starting the day off right by frosting oodles of cupcakes!  (and getting some help from the head pastry chef at Tastings Caterer, who was such a wonderful help!  And food was delicious, if you ever need a caterer here in Boston, I'd highly recommend them)

 Notice the carefully chosen attire--any frosting disasters will disappear into the print of the dress!

 
 Cupcake tree!

The cupcake table, complete with bride and groom!

...and because I'm at a school all about the numbers, here's the rundown:

Time started:  8 am Friday
Time ended:  4:30 am Saturday

Frosting
Batches of lemon swiss buttercream: 4
Batches of maple cream cheese frosting: 4
Batches of white chocolate mint ganache:  4
Batches of cherry swiss buttercream:  3
Batches of espresso buttercream: 4
Total amount of frosting:  80 cups in 12 large pyrex containers

Cupcakes
Lemon cupcakes:  96
Chocolate cupcakes:  216
Pumpkin cupcakes:  84
Vanilla cupcakes:  90
Total:  486

Number of people at the wedding: 137
Number of times I winced on the car ride over:  at least 17
Number of spoons of lobster mac and cheese I ate while decorating:  1  (should have been 18)
Number of times asked if I deliver cupcakes:  2
Number of times I washed a pastry bag:  8
Number of people that told me baking should be my backup plan:  4
Time I fell asleep Saturday night after the wedding:  9:23pm
Time I woke up Sunday morning:  11:30am

(also--if anyone is interested in a .doc file of all the recipes I made plus some cupcake-making-for-a-crowd tips, feel free to email me)

3 comments:

Unknown said...

my goodness golly gracious! That is a lot of cupcakes!!!!!

Mary Kay Bosshart said...

Wow! I can't believe that you made so many cupcakes. The pumpkin ones sound very interesting. The calculation that I didn't see is how many minutes it took you to make each cupcake. And only one bite of lobster mac and cheese - you must have been busy!

bridgetwhoplaysfrenchhorn said...

The recipe for the pumpkin cupcakes is from Smitten Kitchen...yum. It's actually fairly difficult to give an estimate per cupcake because they bake different times, they take different amounts of time to frost--it ends up being about 2 minutes a cupcake, but that's a very rough number.