Sasha's Kitchen: NFL Football Playoff Cupcakes

I am a much bigger baseball fan than I am a football fan. My husband and I are generally fans of the NY Giants, but we will cheer for the Jets too. Anyhow, we were invited over for dinner at some Patriots fans to watch the game tonight, and we were in charge of bringing desert. We decided to have some fun and make Jets/football themed playoff cupcakes. There's really three types here - first I made the little footballs out of fondant and added them to grass green cupcakes. Then, I made some classic Jets cupcakes, to cheer on the New York team. Finally, the last group is the football field, with all the yardlines and the field goals. They are red velvet cupcakes, and you can find my recipe on the prior link. These are the perfect treat for the big game, win or lose!

Sasha's Kitchen: NFL Football Playoff Cupcakes

Sasha's Kitchen: Sushi Cupcakes - Where Art & Food Unite

For tonight's recipe, instead of preparing something focused primarily on taste, my goal was some creative design and aesthetics.  I decided that I wanted to prepare cupcakes that had the look and feel of sushi and sushi maki rolls.  It was an attempt to artistically combine two of my favorite foods - sushi and cupcakes.  I'm not the first baker to attempt to make sushi cupcakes, but I decided to prepare sushi cupcakes using my own original design.  I prepared two types of sushi cupcakes to make my 10 piece Sushi Deluxe: a five piece maki roll (california roll) and 5 pieces of sushi on rice (salmon, tuna, tamago (egg), flying fish roe and shrimp). 

There is a line when food borders on art.  I realize tonight that I have definitely crossed that line.  Art has always been one of my passions - I took AP Art in high school and have always loved painting in acrylic, oil and watercolor - my paintings usually focus on flowers though.  Tonight, I put those painting skills to good use in painting the fish for the sushi cupcakes on rolled fondant, using an array of gel based food colors.  This is the first time I have ever used fondant, as it is more commonly used in creating ornate and elaborate wedding cakes, such as by famed wedding cake designers like Sylvia Weinstock. 

Tonight, I learned from this project that rolled fondant is an incredibly flexible and adaptable medium, which was quite easy to work with and can allow you to do almost anything when it comes to decorating baked goods.  In the future, I plan on creating a decorative cake made out of painted, rolled fondant.

Here's what you will need to make 10 piece Sushi Deluxe Cupcakes:

* 10-12 of your favorite cupcakes (I made a 1/2 batch of red velvet cupcakes, using the recipe I posted last week for Valentine's Day)

* white sprinkles (jimmies) [note - sweetened coconut would be an acceptable alternative]

* orange/red nonpareils for the flying fish roe
* rolled fondant
* gel based food colorings for painting the fondant
* watercolor paintbrushes
* foil cupcake liners
* silicon cupcake tray
* Sasha's signature frosting - click here for the frosting recipe
* optional - cupcake liners that look like sushi - I found that these were not really needed and did not use them in making this recipe

First, bake the cupcakes and allow to cool.  When the cupcakes are done baking, remove the foil liners.  Prepare the frosting, but do not color the frosting, as you are best leaving it white - the same color as rice.  Then frost the top of each of the 10 cupcakes with a spatula (my recipe made 11, but my husband ate one of them . . .)

Dip each of the cupcakes in a bowl with white jimmies.  This will resemble the sushi rice.  As a possiblke alternative, you could use sweetened coconut instead.  To make the tuna, tamago, shrimp and salmon, I rolled out a large piece of fondant using a rolling pin to the desired thickness and painted using my gel-based food colorings (which didn't require too much dilution).  I made bands out of the fondant and painted them black to resemble the seaweed.  Of these fish, I think the shrimp is my favorite.

For the flying fish roe, I added some extra frosting (about a tablespoon) in the middle of the sushi "rice" and dipped that in the red/orange nonpareils.

To make the maki roll - a california roll - I cut small squares out of the fondant, three squares for each of the five cupcakes.  I painted one green, one orange and one black.  I pressed the fondant into the cupcakes.

One of my favorite parts of this project was setting the sushi up for photographs.  My husband proposed to me several years ago, the first time we prepared homemade sushi (of the actual fish variety), so I have quite a few sushi sets we subsequently received as gifts, and used them to present the sushi photographically, with the accompanying chopsticks.

If you are interested in reading my post on how to prepare actual sushi, rather than my offbeat cupcake sushi, click here.

I really enjoyed this project immensely, in part because it was a very art intensive project that allowed me to combine my painting with my food and culinary passions.  I think these cupcakes were not as hard to make as I thought they would be, but came out exaclty as I envisioned.  I hope to do additional baking projects in the future that bring out my artistic side.  Just goes to show that food can and should be treated as an art form, just like painting or sculpture when executed properly.  In addition, I love all the bright colors and the textures of the cupcakes. 

Since starting this blog, tonight's post was one of my favorites both to execute and to write about.  I hope I made Henri Matisse, my favorite artist, proud.

Cupcake

Sasha's Kitchen: Sushi Cupcakes - Where Art & Food Unite

Sasha's Kitchen: Eat Your Heart Out Red Velvet Cupcakes (Valentine's Day Special)

These cupcakes are probably the girliest, cutest, prettiest cupcakes I have ever made.  They are perfect for Valentine's Day, for a dinner party with friends, for a girl's night get together, or for making with a little girl.  I decided to make these  for the ending to a seven course dinner party with good friends who were visiting from Toronto, and my Mom, visiting from Rochester.  Despite the professional appearance of the cupcakes, they are actually not that difficult to make, as long as you have an artisan mixer and the right gel food colorings.

I have long loved red velvet cupcakes.  They have just enough chocolate in them (a couple of Tablespons in the batter) to have a light chocolate flavor to them, but they are not an overpowering death by chocolate cupcake.  Although I developed my own recipe for the frosting, I used one of Martha Stewart's recipes for the red velvet cupcake.  There's only so many ways one could make a red velvet cupcake, but what I like about this recipe is that the batter does not use any butter - only canola oil, which makes it a tad bit healthier - I suppose.

The red velvet hue from the red velvet cupcakes, or in a red velvet cake, comes in part from the chocolate powder, but also from the red food coloring in the cupcakes.  One thing you should be sure to buy to make these cupcakes with top-notch results is some professional grade gel food colorings - this is such a good investment if you plan to do a considerable amount of baking - I got 12 colors for about $10-15 from New York Cake.

Here is Martha Stewart's original red velvet cupcake recipe, which was my starting point, and below is the recipe I used, with some slight modifications.

2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour (I did not use cake flour and they were still great)
2 T unsweetened dutch process cocoa
1 tsp salt
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 1/2 cups canola oil
2 large eggs
1/2 teaspoon red gel-paste food coloring (use red, not pink)
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup buttermilk
1 1/2 tsp baking soda
2 tsp white vinegar

Sasha's Frosting
1 package (8 oz) reduced fat cream cheese
4 cups confectioner's sugar
1 stick of butter
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1-2 small squirts of pink gel food coloring  in soft pink

Preheat the oven to 350 F.  First to prepare the cupcakes, mix the flour, salt, cocoa powder in a large bowl.  Beat the sugar and oil in your artisan mixer until well combined, addding the eggs one at a time, and continuing to beat.  Mix in the gel food coloring and the vanilla extract.  Turn the artisan mixer to low speed, and add the flour and the buttermilk, alternating between additions of each.  Mix well.   In a small bowl, mix the baking soda and the vinegar (it will fizz, just like those volcanos you made as a kid).  Add to the batter and mix for about ten seconds.

Line two silicon cupcake trays with cupcake liners and put the batter in the liners to fill about three quarters full (my husband, Brad, always does this part because he is very neat at doing this without dripping cupcake batter everywhere).  Bake at 350 for about 20-25 minutes until it passes the fork/toothpick test.  Try not to open the oven during the baking process if you can help it, as they will rise better if you don't open it until the end.

To make the frosting, beat the cream cheese and butter at high speed in the artisan mixer for a couple of minutes.  Beat in the powdered sugar (you should put the plastic sides up on the mixer so it doesn't make a powdery mess).  Add a drop or two of the pink food coloring and keep mixing at high speed until the frosting has a nice consistency - a few minutes at least.

To make the decorations on top, buy some marzipan and mold hearts.  I used an unused watercolor paintbrush to paint the hearts with some lightly diluted food coloring and let them dry .  Wait at least an hour or two to frost the cupcakes - they must cool off completely or you will melt the frosting.  To get the professional look, I used a frosting bag fitted with a fluted tip.  When you squeeze the bag to push out the icing, do so in a circular manner to frost the cupcake the way i did.  The result is a pretty, professional look.  Top the cupcakes with the marzipan hearts.

These cupcakes taste as good as they look.  The recipe makes abotu 24 cupcakes (we made 22), but feel free to cut the recipe in half if you want a smaller batch.  Our house is filled with cupcakes - everywhere you look there's a cupcake.

Sasha's Kitchen: Eat Your Heart Out Red Velvet Cupcakes (Valentine's Day Special)