The Adventures of Team Daniels: Cupcake Wars

Daisy has sucked us all into watching Cupcake Wars with her. For some strange reason, and I cannot tell you why, it is interesting to watch. Making chocolate cake was on our summer bucket list. We decided cupcakes would fit this goal.

Amazing as it is, this was one of our best days of the summer. Everyone was engaged and nice and not one time did someone ask to get on a screen.

{insert 'Hallelujah' chorus here}

After some searching on Pinterest we decided upon a vanilla cupcake (from scratch, mind you) with a chocolate chip cookie dough filling, topped with homemade chocolate frosting and decorated with a miniature chocolate chip cookie, also from scratch. Cupcake Wars is not for the weak, people. It is serious baking.

First step--prepping

Cookie dough was first on the docket because it had to chill for a couple hours.

The hardest part was not eating it.

Of course, your fingers must be cleaned at some point, so why not lick them off?

As the dough was chilling, we began work on the vanilla cake batter.

[Side bar - take note of the cooperation going on here]

The chilled cookie dough balls went into the cupcakes before baking.

Here they are straight from the oven.

Chocolate icing time.

Speaking of time, we were cutting it close to the wire. Our time-limit was running out very quickly!

Everyone was working on frosting and decorating as quickly as possible.

My hands were covered in frosting, so Elijah was in charge of pics. Here a just a few randos he took. The others did not even have a subject.

(That is the dogs' Gremlin chew toy.)

There may or may not have been some taste-testing along the way.

A few of the cupcakes were underdone. We were just hoping the judges would not pick one of those to eat.

Now time for the presentation. The theme was Mini-opolis. So we opted for a rainbow colored tray to match the Mini-opolis background. The cupcake liners were rainbow, as well.