Baking with Mrs. Hershman.

What do Aim and J think is more fun than baking together? Baking with a wonderful friend who loves baked goods as much as we do. Our friend Rachael invited us to her home to bake cupcakes for her roommate's bridal shower.

We made Strawberry Shortcake cupcakes while Rachael made her infamous red velvet recipe.

Note Rachael's super adorable aprons she lent to us...

Rachael's dog Zoey was a huge component to our baking success.

Rachael's Red Velvets (died purple to fit her roomies wedding colors). Notice how perfect they look. Before scooping the batter into the liners, she puts the batter in a ziploc and cuts a hole in the corner, making for easy batter distribution. A fantastic tip!!!

Our final product: Strawberry Shortcake cups.

Pretty pretty pretty.

Thanks again Rachael for inviting us to bake with you! So so fun.

Until next time...

Love and Cupcakes.

We've got ourselves a Situation.

This past week we celebrated the blessed birth of our dear friend Peter Raphael Fredericks. To show our appreciation and love, we decided to make cupcakes of his choice that reflected his character (Italian, flashy, red velvet- essentially guido cupcakes)

Peter loves red velvet, but we decided to embrace the Italian colors. So we split our batter and colored half of it green and half of it red.

The end result: red and green velvet cake. Cream cheese frosting. Leopard print liners. Italian flags. And edible gold glitter. (purchased from A&J's of course)

Guidofied

The best part about distributing cupcakes at a birthday party: Seeing the love of cuppies in our friends eyes. Check it out for yourself!

Stay tuned next week for more cupcake fun as we collaborate with our creative and talented friend Rachael Lunghi.

Cupcakes, Love and Guido's,

Aim and J

Mocha Cheesecake Cupcakes

These bad boys are not for the faint of heart (or weak stomached). We decided to use a brownie crust, partially because we couldn't find the right type of chocolate wafer cookies to use for a cookie crust. We considered this a blessing in disguise because the gooey brownie bottom really complemented the mocha flavored cheesecake.

In order to achieve the mocha flavor, we used a cheesecake base and added melted bittersweet chocolate chips and a little bit of strong brewed coffee. We used Pikes Place, our favorite Starbucks flavor.

(photo via tumblr)

Also this week we discovered the wonders of silicon baking cups. After being a bit apprehensive, we have learned these are the way to go. They don't require cooking spray and the cupcakes are easily removed without falling apart.

You can tell a cheesecake is done when the tops rises and cracks, but they still jiggle a bit. It sounds tricky, but you definitely can tell when they are finished.

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Gooeylicious.

We soon faced the problem of what to top these with. After contemplating our always reliable cream cheese frosting, we determined that would have been a cream cheese overload. These cupcakes are heavy enough, they needed to be paired with something light.

Bet you didn't know they sold Cool Whip in a can now! Yeah, we cheated. We didn't make our own homemade topping this time, but Cool Whip is unbeatable. Don't judge.

Caution: These must be refrigerated. One of our friends who shall not be named learned this lesson the hard way when they nearly melted away. Plus, they set better when refrigerated.

Alisha demonstrates how a classy girl sports a cupcake.

We brought some to our friends Victoria and Jessica hard at work on duty.

Here a Chick, Pt. 2.

How to create the cutest spring chicks possible in Six Easy Steps:

1) Batter (Coconut Almond)

2) Buttercream Frosting (challenging, but if you want to save your forearm 10 minutes of holding a handheld mixer, we suggest one of these)

3) Invert + Frost your cuppies (we used a big cupcake pan)

4) Golden Toasted Coconut

5) Raw Almonds + Licorice Strands + Chocolate Chips

6) Hatched!

No but seriously, these tasted as cute as they looked. Here's the recipe for the coconut almond cake batter. We encourage you to try it. Hope you had the happiest Easter and a marvelous Spring Break!

Love Love Love,

Aime & J

Here a Chick. There a Chick. Everywhere a Chick Chick.

Cupcakes: Bringing people together all over the world.

It's Spring Break, bring out the carrot cake, deviled eggs, Peeps and spring chickens. Spring chickens? Yeah, spring chickens. Keep reading.

An obvious spring cupcake choice was carrot cake. We decided on this great recipe from Smitten Kitchen. Our favorite part was the Maple Cream Cheese frosting. For several reasons:

1. We love cream cheese.

2. We love cream cheese frosting.

3. We love maple syrup.

4. One time Aimee had a maple-related accident.

5. One of our friends last name is Maples.

You may have noticed a small object in Jessica's right hand. That object happens to be a young spring chicken, named Lucy (short for Lucifer). Jessica used to have unconditional agape love for Lucy (see here). Until Lucy hit chicken puberty (we've all been there). Lucy lost her fluffiness, grew feathers, formed an unusually long neck and an attitude to go along with it.

*We would like to pause to mention that Lucy had nothing to do with our baking experience. We keep a clean kitchen.*

Unconditional Agape Love:

Lucifer:

When Jessica realized she couldn't love Lucy in an appropriate fashion, she made the mature decision to deliver her to a new home that would show here the love she deserved. We knew just the place. Needless to say, it was here that Lucy met her soulmate, Chris P Cox.

Photo Credit: Leighton Cusack

It was a tale of love and loss for Lucy as Chris had to return to Michigan shortly after this photo was taken. Which has brought us to the conclusion, that the only true love in this dark world is Jesus, our resurrected Savior, and the agape love of spring-themed cupcakes. Yeah, there will be more of those to come. Stay tuned for Spring Break baking.

Love Love Love,

Aim & J

Happy Birthday Jonathan!

Monkey Business.

Sometimes we don't like to follow the rules. Like tonight for instance. We didn't feel like following just one recipe...so we followed 3. (Sidenote: If you haven't picked up, we've steered away from restricting ourselves to the bounds of the cupcake book. We've expanded to blogs, websites...whatever inspires us.) When pondering what type of cupcakes we would make this week we knew we wanted the flavors of peanut butter, chocolate, and banana. However, we couldn't find one particular recipe that hit the nail on the head. We found a banana cake recipethat sounded dreamy, but that wasn't enough. We needed to fulfill our cravings for peanut butter and chocolate as well. So we found this peanut butter cream cheese frosting recipe (because you gotta have cream cheese...please don't look at the calorie count). As for chocolate, we decided a store bought brownie recipe would suffice (dark chocolate...go big or go home).

Tragedy struck when we had a mixer-related near-fire emergency crisis. Whilst using the mixer to make the frosting, there was an undeniable electrical fire smell. We value our lives more than cream cheese frosting, so we unplugged the mixer and went back to the basics: bicepts and brawn. While some of you may know Aimee has a current ailment in her knee, her upper body is stronger than ever.

Churn baby churn....

We have special dedication this week. Special little cupcakes for a special little monkey named Emma Trevino...who turned 19 today, not 18 (a common misconception). We love her spunk, spirit, and spirally hair.

Until next time....

Cupcakes and Love,

Aim & J