I Love Lucy Cupcakes

I love it when hard work pays off.  I stressed quite a bit about these cupcakes but all the hard work and cake tests paid off because everyone at the party raved about the cupcakes.  Yeah for me!

My cousin (not the one who just graduated from Medical School - we had her party yesterday, remember?  I'm talking about her sister) is having a baby girl in July.  There's just so much to celebrate and you can't celebrate without cake.  Three kinds of cake to be exact.

When I asked what cake and icing flavors the future mama liked I got a list that went like this.  "No chocolate (cake or icing).  She does like vanilla, peanut butter, strawberry cake, cream cheese, butter cream, raspberry, Oreo, carrot cake...."  I would normally have attributed this kind of a list to the fact that she was pregnant but I know my cousin and how much she loves cupcakes so I was pretty sure I would have gotten the same list even if she wasn't preggo.  I tried my best to incorporate as many of these flavors into her desserts as possible and I think I did pretty well.

The theme of the baby shower was I Love Lucy so it was pink hearts all the way!  Please allow me to show you all the love...

The first cupcake was an Oreo Cupcake with Oreo Cream Cheese Frosting.  The link will lead you to the original post about these cupcakes and the recipes.  I used Cupcake recipe #2 and the Cream Cheese Frosting recipe.

For the toppers, I cut out fondant hearts in two sizes which was a super easy way to decorate these guys.

The second cupcake was Carrot Cake with Maple Cream Cheese Frosting.  Oddly enough, finding a carrot cake recipe that I liked was the hardest thing to do... it took me 4 recipe tests to get to these and I really like them.  Plus, they're not ugly like most carrot cake.  I will absolutely never make carrot cake again without this frosting - it's just that good.

These cupcakes are donned with sugar hearts.  They're basically colored sugar pressed into cubes.  I used this tutorial which was really easy to follow - I highly recommend it and since you're using cookie cutters to make the shapes you could make them in any shape you want.

My person opinion is that the third cupcake was the best.  It was the most interesting flavor combination with strawberry cake, peanut butter mousse filling and strawberry rose frosting.  (If you're looking for the recipes on the links, I used Cake #3 and Mousse #1) The combo may sound a bit strange but peanut butter and strawberries go together so perfectly!

Since the strawberry frosting on these was already pink, I just used pink heart sprinkles to decorate these guys... super easy!

Image stolen from my cousin because she's a better photographer than me, by far!

I will absolutely be keeping all three of these cupcakes in my repertoire - they were great and everyone had good things to say about them.  Plus the glowing mother to be loved each one of them and that's what matters most.

Julie