Pass: Carrot and Banana Cupcake with Cream Cheese Frosting

I'm venturing out to the other branches of baking... Such as making frosting! Such a scary thing for me.  I think I'm pretty comfortable with making loaves but frosting is a new thing for me. Not only is it nerve racking but it's also very fatty. Haha 

I'd make it anyway! It's the holidays!!! 

In my effort to try to make cupcakes, I found this app on the App Store at like 2 in the morning.. It's called Sweet Baking.  It pretty much has everything I need for my start up baking skills.  It's a super cool app and I highly recommend it.

My chosen recipe for today is Carrot Banana Cake that I will be using as the base for my cupcake.  

As you might have noticed... I like tweaking the recipes I'm presented and so I just omitted the nuts.  

The ingredients I used for the base are: 

1 2/3 cups all purpose flour

3 eggs

3/4 cup brown sugar 

1/2 tsp nutmeg 

1/2 tsp cinnamon 

1 carrot, grated 

1 banana, mashed

1 tbsp baking powder 

2/3 cup rice bran oil 

I sifted all the dry ingredients together ..

On a separate bowl I combined the eggs, brown sugar...

I beat those wet ingredients together and it looked like coffee..

I then added the dry mixture and mixed it together with the eggs and brown sugar mix... 

At this point it looked like peanut butter and I started worrying that something wasn't right...

Of course there was something wrong coz I didn't add the oil!

I know I'm a noobie... But I'm not even sure if there's any unwritten law in baking and what I just did was a mortal sin...

I post added the oil and I mixed it again with the electric mixer... Thank goodness it looked fine afterwards.. I thought I was gonna waste that batch! 

I then added the healthy stuff - banana and carrots... 

Again, as with everything.. It looked like puke, smelled like heaven... 

I got these super cute cupcake liners in pink and white coz I'm girly like that. There's nothing manly about cupcakes so I decided to go all out..

I just filled the cupcakes to about 2/3 of the liner... This thing I learned in Pinterest...


So on to the good part... Cream cheese frosting!

Here's what I used:

A stick of butter

half a block of cream cheese 

1 cup sugar (I didn't have powdered sugar..it was so hard to come by!) 

1/2 tsp vanilla extract 

I just blended all those ingredients together and made a total mess in the kitchen coz the cream cheese and the powder weren't soft enough so my super powerful mixer went berserk! 

Anyway, all's well.. 

After about 20 minutes at 180 degrees Celsius...

I have a perfect looking base just waiting to be iced and decorated.

Who better to help me... 

... Than my 8-year-old-baker-sister Celine! Here she is hard at work putting the cream cheese frosting on the cupcakes with a syringe.. haha

Yay! We did it! I got these sprinkles from this store called Cooks Exchange.. I got them since they looked like they were Christmas colors.. even if my liners are not.. 

So yes... This first time baking experience at making cupcakes is a PASS! I brought it to my lola's 93rd birthday and people seemed to have liked it.

If I were to change one thing here is that I wouldn't have substituted the confectioner's sugar with just regular granulated sugar coz you can really feel the granules on the icing... However, I didn't have a choice and it was worth a try.

I know better now.. So I'm excited to make other types of cupcakes..

This is so much fun!

I wanna make chocolate based ones next!