It’s that third point that I’m stuck on.  It seems like the majority that I’ve seen have white or brown liners with basic swirls of frosting.  WHY?  Why have wedding cupcakes that look just like any other cupcake at any bakery?  Everything for your wedding is customized to fit your style, so shouldn’t cupcakes be custom decorated, too?

There are about 57239590 products bakers can use to make cupcakes extra-special.  Colored sugars, pearlized sugars, jimmies, nonpareils, quins, dragees, sixlets, edible glitter, pearls, candy beads, fondant, edible paper, isomalt crystals (edible diamonds), and almost every color liner imaginable.  Many bakeries and cupcakeries are already doing a great job using this stuff (shout out to Crumbs and Doilies, who I can’t wait to visit next time I am in London), so why do I still see so many plain ol’ cupcakes?

Lisa and I don’t really do ‘plain’ in our own lives (ask me about my Bollywood-inspired living room!) and we certainly bring that to the business, so maybe we’re biased.  But one of the reasons I love this job is that I get to be creative and design something both pretty and special, even personal, to the couple that’s getting married.  So I wanted to feature one of our recent wedding towers to show how great personal design can be.  It’s not plain, and maybe it’s not even elegant, but it’s as fun, colorful, and literary as the couple we made it for:

The good news is that prices are supposed to steady in 2012.  The bad news is that they’re not going down.  So we’ve had to redesign our pricing for cupcakes, small cakes, and delivery.  We’ve also had to add a set up charge for weddings because we found we were spending as much as two hours helping with set up (not just of cupcake displays – when we show up, we’re prepared to help with anything the wedding party needs) for about $5.  Undervaluing our work isn’t good business.

We did a lot of research, a lot of math, and discussed every detail to arrive at pricing that we believe is both fair to our customers and doesn’t undervalue our product.  We believe we provide the absolute best customer service and the tastiest cupcakes (our 5 star ratings back us up on that), but we know part of that great service is the feeling of value.  So let us break it down for you:

• The average wedding cake for 120 people costs roughly $543.
• The average cost of cupcakes for 120 people is $434.
• Our cost, even after raising our price, is just $310.

You can add in a small cutting/anniversary cake, cupcake tower, delivery, and set up and we’ll still save you money – it’ll total only $408.  We’ve also kept our pricing ala carte instead of creating pricing packages so that we can work with any budget.  Because ultimately, what we want to do is give everyone the option of having a great tasting, beautiful, memorable dessert at their wedding (or commitment ceremony, bridal shower, baby shower, birthday, bar/bat mitzvah, holiday party, family dinner, etc).

So our prices may have gone up a bit, but it comes with a promise – we’ll never cut back on service, quality, or our commitment to our customers.

Hello ladies and gents! The holidays are fast approaching – can you believe it? We just wanted to remind you that weddings are not our only bag, we would LOVE to do holiday orders for your family event, holiday
party, office potluck, church get together or any other occasion!

We’ll have special holiday flavors available – Harvest Pumpkin Spice, Swiss Hot Chocolate & Marshmallow, and Peppermint Mocha to name a few (more to come!) and as always we will custom decorate to your taste =) Head over to our order form and order up yours! 1 doz minimum, we’ll need 48 hrs to complete your order.

Today we spotted a post on the (truly excellent) blog A Practical Wedding about the pledge that they have all their vendors sign before they can advertise on APW (and one they ask potential clients to take, as well).  Though we don’t have an advertising budget yet, we’re proud to say that we already live by their pledge.  It is reprinted below with a few additions specific to Our Lady in italics.

The APW Sanity / Our Lady of Cupcakes Pledge

-  A wedding is an awesome party, but it’s the marriage that really matters.

-  It takes two people to get married. It’s not all about the bride (and sometimes there isn’t a bride to begin with).

-  We support LGBTQ couples’ right to marry, and we are delighted to work with them.

-We don’t charge a premium just because we heard the word “wedding.” (Note: Our pricing is the same regardless of event.)

-  We will be upfront and fair about our pricing. We won’t surprise you with a secret fee because you want frosting on the cake, not just the cake. (Take a look!)

-  You don’t have to have cake at your wedding.

-  However you decided to tie the knot, we’re on your team.

-  Weddings come in all different shapes/sizes/colors/budgets/etc., but as long as you two end up married to each other, it will have been a successful wedding.

-  Our cupcakes will never be old, stale, frozen, or contain fillers like shortening.

-  We will communicate with you in the most timely manner possible and answer all questions, no matter how silly or frantic.

-  We respect all members of the wedding industry and will work with your other vendors (and maybe even send some leftover cupcakes their way).

-  We will do everything within our power to make your experience easy, worry-free, and disaster-proof.

Not getting married?  This pledge applies to you, too!  It’s not just weddings we go out of our way for – it’s every client.  Whether you order 1 dz or 25 dz, we want to make them perfect for you.  It’s why we do what we do!

Since February, we’ve been really busy turning what started as a blog into an actual business.  We’ve filled dozens of orders for office parties…

birthdays…

graduations…

bridal showers…

baby showers…

and the biggest of all:  WEDDINGS!

Very exciting stuff!

In addition to the special event catering, which we love, the Lisa half of OLoC graduated with her Master’s degree AND started baking for Royal Coffee (http://www.royalcoffeebar.com/), where our cupcakes are featured along with cookies, scones (from KT’s mom’s secret recipe – the best ever!), biscotti, bars, pie and other sweet treats.

See?   All perfectly reasonable excuses to slack a bit on the blogging.  We really WANT to do more – put up a gallery page, tweet on a regular basis, streamline the site design, get a new logo, etc – but who can find the time between baking, our “real” jobs, our boyfriends (two of the most awesome guys on the planet), family, friends, and dogs… whew!  Until we can make more time in our day, please check out our Flickr account to see pics of all the great stuff we’ve made lately!

Here’s a sample of the work we’ve done so far:

Dark Chocolate Orange cupcakes with custom paper corsets and Hazelnut Mocha cupcakes with dark/white chocolate corset designs. These were made for Allison's corset-themed birthday party.
Dark Chocolate cupcakes with Peppermint Marshmallow frosting, covered in white chocolate and decorated with fondant and candies to look like snowmen. These were given to friends and co-workers as holiday gifts. Many thought they were too cute to eat!
Dark Chocolate Peppermint and Lemon Tart cupcakes, in duo pack boxes with holiday decorations. These were given by one of our customers to her clients.
These monkey cupcakes were made for a baby shower. We thought we'd never use the chocolate monkey mold again until...
Someone else wanted sock monkey cupcakes for yet another baby shower! We also made cupcake toppers with sock monkey cut-outs.
We made these heart-shaped valentines cakes just for fun, to see what we could do with our decorations. Cute!

This bacon is seriously delicious, omg. So we took this bacon and crumbled some into our french toast batter. We started with a basic yellow batter and added some cinnamon and a hint of maple – and it smelled just like french toast.

As those puppies baked up we worked on our maple buttercream. We had to experiment with this one a bit as we originally purchased maple extract to use, thinking it would be a stronger flavor than just maple syrup. Well, the flavor was strong, and also disgusting. Ew. So….no maple extract. We used a nice Vermont maple syrup, but next time I think we’ll need a darker, more intense syrup as this one was a bit light to be used for the buttercream.

We ended up cooking down the maple syrup a bit to concentrate the flavor and it worked well! It also caramelized a bit which gave it some depth, I appreciated that because this frosting was on the sweet side for me.

The cupcakes came out of the oven looking and smelling wonderful.

While there were no frosting shenanigans this time, I did get a little crazy with the maple syrup drizzle. It was more of a maple syrup flung about the kitchen….but they came out looking pretty, so the clean up was worth it!

And voila! Bacon French Toast cupcake with Maple Buttercream frosting, garnished with bacon bits and Vermont maple syrup AKA The Breakfast Club. Honestly, these were a bit on the sweet side for me. I also don’t like french toast (too eggy, though it always smells so good) so they weren’t my personal favorite to eat BUT we got rave reviews from lots of peeps, so they were, in fact, a success!

We’ve begun to gain some business momentum and filled a couple of large orders!

These were for a tween girl’s birthday, the top ones are strawberry cake with vanilla bean buttercream frosting, and the bottom are vanilla cake with strawberry buttercream frosting. We had fun decorating these, as her favorite colors were the same as ours: pink and black. They were a hit at the party and we’ve since added the strawberry cake to our permanent menu – starting with a vanilla batter base and adding fresh strawberries cooked down with a little sugar until they were the consistency of jam made for the most moist and tasty cake!

These guys were for our friend Jeff’s son’s birthday, he was turning 7. When Jeff told us his favorite cake was cherry, we weren’t sure what to do with that, so we figured what little kid doesn’t love a maraschino cherry? We chopped some up to add to our vanilla batter, used a bit of the juice for extra flavor and came out with a pretty nice end product! We frosted them with vanilla bean buttercream and garnished with mini chocolate chips and a cherry on top. We hear they went over famously!

These guys were, proudly, our second order that came from an office who wants our cupcakes to accompany monthly birthday celebrations! We are so excited that everyone loved our cupcakes so much that they have become our first repeat customer. The first two photos are of our Pirate’s Booty and Raspberry Berets, which you know all about. The last two are newer flavors: Lemon Tart and Grasshopper. The Lemon Tart have a graham cracker crust, yellow cake with lemon filling, and meringue frosting that we have an absolute blast browning with our creme brulee torch. The Grasshopper was inspired by a popular drink, it is chocolate cake with Andes mint chips and a Bailey’s Irish Cream frosting, garnished with more Andes chips.

I have a few more photos to post, but alas, it is time for me to get to the gym. Something that has become increasingly important as we’ve perfected our recipes and tasted lord knows how much frosting on the way! We’re so excited to share our progress with you, and I promise we won’t stay away so long this time.

Image borrowed from Antisocial Ghost

So I recently read this article and it really resonated with me.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jennifer-mccoy/cupcake-madness_b_675933.html

I’ve been reading and hearing about the demise of the cupcake for some time now. I personally disagree with it. Sure, its been a big trend and maybe the madness around the trend itself will wane a bit, but I still believe that putting out a high quality tasty treat will trump fads any day. That being said, I think that’s actually the crux of Ms. McCoy’s argument – not really that cupcakes will become unpopular because the trend is tired, but because the trend has lead to production of a subpar product with all the bandwagon jumping that’s been going on since it all started. She made the very same point in her article that we have discussed here – finding cupcakes that taste good is not an easy task. And one would think this wouldn’t be the case with the number of cupcakeries out there. So if the public’s taste for cupcakes begins to go south, I’m blaming those folks who raced to open a beautiful boutique cafe, filled their cases with gorgeous cupcakes, and delivered only on the visual. What else can we expect when a customer is wooed by the charming surroundings, the mounds of fluffy frosting, and the promise of a treat tasting like it came straight from heaven – only to experience a dry, too sweet, dud of a cupcake that isn’t even as good as an old school chocolate Hostess? This my friends, will be the reason for the demise of our beloved cupcake, not the trend itself wearing out like an overplayed pop song.

The good news is, for those of us who put taste above all else, I don’t think we’ll need to worry. Cupcakes are perfect in so many ways – they’re single serving, they’re offered in an endless array of flavors, the possibilities for decorating are endless – surely the dessert loving will never truly turn their backs on such a classic comfort food. As for the bandwagon jumpers, those business owners looking to capitalize on the latest trend, and the clientele that thrive on getting their hands on the latest item on the “it” list, they can move on – then there’s just more for the rest of us to enjoy. Viva la cupcake!!

We checked out a lot of recipes for s’mores cupcakes, most of which feature a graham cracker cake.  For me, the graham cracker is not the star of the s’mores show – it’s just what holds everything together.  We just wanted a hint of that flavor and we wanted to keep the textural aspect of the cracker in tact, so we decided to go with a graham cracker crust.  We started by crushing up the grahams:

Using a meat tenderizer is fun, but optional.  We added butter and sugar to the graham cracker crumbs, stirred, and then pressed them into the bottom of the cupcake liners:

We chopped up some semi-sweet chocolate to form a chocolatey layer between the cake and the crust that would hold it all together.  Then we popped them in the oven and baked until the chocolate pieces melted:

Then it was time for the cake batter.  None of the recipes we saw featured chocolate the way we thought a s’more should, so we made up our own chocolate chocolate chip batter and poured it on to the crusts:

Because part of the cup is already taken up by the crust, you’ll have a lot of batter leftover.  We use ours to make mini cupcakes that we “test taste” throughout the day.  It’s a good idea to taste minis with your frosting instead of just piping and praying they taste good together.  They came in extra handy this time because we got to test our frosting browning method.  We made marshmallow frosting for these, an obvious choice.  It involved A LOT of standing around, beating the frosting while it was on a double boiler:

Since we don’t have a pastry torch (and, honestly, the thought of one of us with a torch is a little scary), we decided to try using the broiler in the oven to toast the marshmallow frosting.  We piped some blobs of it on to our minis and gave it a try:

It worked!  Sort of – you can kind of see from the picture that one in the middle just oozed everywhere.  We decided not to pipe so high on the full sized cakes:

We put this cute little guy in the oven to broil and he came out so pretty!  Perfectly golden and with a nice swirl.  We were really excited:

Side note: Piping marshmallow frosting is really sticky, messy business.  Lisa was cleaning bits of it off of things for a week and I, well, just take a look:

Not all of them came out this well – as we tried to do a large batch we noticed that the ones we piped first would gradually lose their shape and that, because of oven hot spots, they didn’t all brown evenly.  Still, they looked good!

We added a little Hershey’s square for garnish:

Then we ate one.  OMG, they tasted amazing.  The smooth chocolatey cake, the crunch and sandiness of the graham cracker crust, and the sticky richness of the marshmallow frosting all combined to make the PERFECT s’more.  These are still my favorites, as I am a huge marshmallow fan, and I can’t wait to make them again.

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