Chocolate Gingerbread Cupcakes with White Chocolate Buttercream

It's almost 1 month before x-mas and everyone is getting in the holiday spirit. That includes gingerbread everything including cookies, lattes and of course cupcakes! The holidays wouldn't be complete without it.  I made these chocolate gingerbread cupcakes with Soma Chocolatier cocoa powder and European butter, and topped it with white chocolate buttercream and a cute little shimmery gingerbread man made out of fondant. I thought it would be more artistic to not put faces on these little fellas.

Black Sesame Cupcakes and Pistachio Cupcakes 

Its a couple of my friends birthdays this week so I wanted to surprise them with some cute cupcakes. Plus it gave me an excuse to make some more figurines with fondant.  One of my friends loves pistachio so I made half batch of pistachio and the other half black sesame for a more asian flavor. Black sesame is big in Asian desserts and has a nutty flavor to it. My favorite is black sesame rice balls in sweet soup and black sesame ice cream.

I roasted the black sesame to bring out the flavor and made a vanilla bean base with black sesame mixed into it, with black sesame buttercream.  Then I crushed up pistachio and made a vanilla bean base, with pistachio mixed into it, with pistachio buttercream. This time I added a very small bit of green food coloring to give it some more color. Both flavors used European butter.

For the figurines, I made a different cupcake topper for each friend... race car driver, roses and makeup. It was a lot of fun making these, its just like playdough!

Pistachio Vanilla Bean Purse Cupcakes

My close friend's birthday is coming up and she really likes pistachio and designer purses so I decided to make her some pistachio cupcakes with super cute fondant purses as the topper.  The purses were made from scratch and I'm super excited they turned out so well! The cupcake was a vanilla bean base with grounded up pistachios, topped with pistachio buttercream. Next time I might add some green food coloring to make the buttercream 'pop' a bit more.

It was the first time I've baked cupcakes using Madagascar vanilla beans and it really made the cupcake a lot more flavorful. I'll definitely be using that spice from now on for my vanilla cupcakes.

Mocha Chocolate Project Deployment Cupcakes

My company was having a major overnight deployment this weekend so I thought I'd bring in some mocha chocolate cupcakes to help keep the team awake.  Our project themes use the Dharma stations from the tv show 'Lost' so there was an Arrow project (left) and a Looking Glass project (right). There is a very popular and high end chocolatier store in Toronto called Soma. The mocha chocolate buttercream used Soma's cocoa powder to give it an even more yummier chocolate flavor.