Grandma's 89th Birthday Cupcakes - February 12, 2011

Yesterday we celebrated Grandma's 89th birthday. She is the matriarch of our family, has been for quite some time now, and she's wonderful at it. She deserves as much fun and love as I can give her on her birthdays, so I spoil her with her birthday cake. In this case it was birthday cupcakes.

Here's Grandma B with her birthday cake from last year. Unfortunately I was a bit scatterbrained yesterday and didn't get any pictures of her with her birthday cupcakes when she was enjoying them. Normally one of my cousins and my dad are both there with their more "professional" style cameras taking pictures. The cousin didn't bring his camera this time and my dad had to stay home because he has a virus and didn't want to take the chance of giving it to Grandma B. I should have been paying better attention and taken as many pictures as I could.

I borrowed the idea for these cupcakes from Bakerella's website and put my own spin on it. She has great instructions for making her "milkshake cupcakes" on her site. I would have loved to have made them exactly as she did but changed the flavors and ingredients as were necessary due to dietary restrictions.

First, I made the vanilla cupcakes in the clear silicone baking cups only filling them half full. This is very important because the sauce has to fit inside the silicone cup. Regular baking cups won't work - too soft.

Grandma likes raspberries so I used some red raspberries I picked in our backyard to make the raspberry sauce. Isn't that color gorgeous?  The sauce was quite yummy. 

I also used some strawberry freezer jam for half of the cupcakes because grandma LOVES strawberries.

The raspberry sauce and the strawberry jam were used in place of the chocolate ganache that Bakerella used in her version. I simply spooned the sauce on top of the cupakes being careful not to over fill them. Otherwise your cup runneth over!

 

Raspberry on the left and strawberry on the right.

The next part is fairly easy. I topped all the cupcakes with vanilla buttercream. Instead of using the cute paper straws that Bakerella used, mainly because I didn't have them, I made these cute sugar cookie spoons. I piped blue "B's" on them to mimick Grandma B's silverware and stuck a spoon into each of the cupcakes.  

So, you wanna see the finished cupcakes? Huh? Do you REALLY want to see them?

Ok, ok!