Yesterday we celebrated my nephew’s 1st birthday! My sister held an adorable themed party – Where the Wild Things Are. Growing up, I remember reading that book over and over again as a child, thinking how imaginative his mind was. To have a forest grow within his room, go to another land with beasts, become their king, only to realize that he DID miss his dinner and decided to calm down and come back to reality. Funny thing about this story is I don’t see this in my nephew at all, yet. But, he IS only one year old! Perhaps one day he will be parading around in a wild outfit, aggravating my sister while she is cooking. I look forward to hearing stories of her wild and wonderful adventure with her beautiful son. 🙂
For the party, I made cupcakes with crazy looking hair similar to the creatures in the book. At least I tried. It helped that there were toppers and wraps to outfit the cakes making a nice finish. The recipe I used was Add a Pinch, and then I added my own spices to the mix to jazz it up. The cupcakes were a hit!
Jazzed Up Chocolate Cupcakes -makes 12 cupcakes
- 1 cup all-purpose flour
- 1 cup granulated sugar
- ½ cup cocoa
- 1 teaspoon baking powder
- ½ teaspoon baking soda
- ½ teaspoon salt
- ½ teaspoon of cinnamon
- ¼ teaspoon of All-Spice
- ½ cup milk
- ¼ cup vegetable oil
- 1 large egg
- ½ teaspoon bourbon vanilla
- ½ cup boiling water
Heat oven to 325 degrees. Add liners to muffin pan and spray cooking oil on the liners. Don’t overspray. Combine in a stand mixer all dry ingredients. Add the wet ingredients and mix again. This will create a wet mixture, so I poured it into a large measuring cup to pour into the liners without making a mess. Bake for roughly 20 minutes depending on your oven. Once cool, add your favorite frosting to top. I used my own which is a little of this a little of that. I really don’t have it measured out, but I do use salted butter to balance out the heavy sugar load. Also a splash of milk helps the texture smooth out.
The Chocolate Bottle 