BM # 73: Week 1, Day 1
Theme : Mini baked treats 
Dish: Emoji mini cupcakes

This post is about expressing emotions. 13 kind of emotions, to be exact. Some expressions were ‘swallowed’ in the process of making these.

I made two batches of mini cup cakes for my husband’s 40th birthday. One batch was an eggless mango cake and the other was a coke based vanilla cake. I will be sharing the recipe tomorrow.

The theme I had in my mind was ‘range of emotions’ for turning 40. Happiness, love, tears, kiss, wink, astonishment…My friend put it in a nutshell for me, she said that’s quite an emotional baggage there ;-D.

Of the 48 mini cupcakes, 8 cakes were sacrificed for the delicate art of taste testing. The rest 40 formed the number 40 to greet my husband and his friend who shares his birthday. So 40 mini cakes for 40th birthday, in shape of the number 40.

For the Coca cola cake, this is the same recipe used for making the mini pizza cake in the next post.

Recipe source: Local Milk Blog

Ingredients:

• 3 cups flour
• 2.5 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 2 sticks (226 gms) butter at room temperature
• 2 cups sugar
• 4 eggs
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 1 1/2 cups coca cola

Method:

1. Heat oven to 180 C/ 350F. Grease and line two 9″ pans or in my case, two 4″ pans and line a mini cupcake pan with baking cups.
2. Whisk the dry ingredients (flour, baking powder, salt, nutmeg) in a medium sized bowl.
3. Beat butter for 3-4 minutes using a hand or stand mixer. Add the sugar carefully and beat it in until light and fluffy.
4. Add eggs, one at a time and beat it in. Add vanilla extract and let it combine well.
5. In three batches, add the coca cola and the flour mix in, alternating between the two. So first add 1/2 cup coke and once its incorporated, add 1/3rd of the flour mix. Add the 2nd batch of coke only after the flour is mixed in well. Another half cup of coke, beat it in well. Next 1/3rd of the flour mix. One more round of alternate mixing like this and take the bowl out of the mixer and fold everything well with a silicone spatula to ensure that there aren’t any dry lumps.
6. Pour the batter until its a little over half way  into the prepared pans. Bake until a skewer comes free when inserted in the middle of the cake, about 35- 40 minutes. For mini cupcakes, the time was around 20 minutes.
7. Take the cake off the oven and let it rest for about ten minutes undisturbed. Carefully remove from the pan and frost and use once its completely cool

I looked at the internet for making these. A google search for emoji cupcakes gave a lot of ideas. Yellow fondant with a bit of red, white, blue and black fondant is what you need here. I used an edible black marker for the emoji eyes. That made the work a lot lighter than it would have been otherwise. The emoji has to be made separately and then kept on top of a frosted cupcake.

To make the work easier, I made three cupcakes for each emoji. Forty different emojis would have been extremely tough otherwise. I used a piping tip for cutting out the mouth for most part. The smaller end of writing tip for making the eyes. I also used a flower mold and used the petal as eyes for the winking emojis.

This goes to Blogging Marathon #73 under the theme mini bakes. Check out the link to know more about the event and to see the other participants posts. 

This is for Srivalli’s Kid’s Delight event , guest hosted by Gayathri, themed on Mini Baked Goodies.