valentine's day Peppermint twist cupcake with a kiss on top and more from Grace-ful Cakes

Peppermint twist cupcake with a peppermint Hershey's Kiss on top...aw. It's by Grace-ful Cakes in Southgate, Michigan, via Flickr. You can also find them on Facebook or contact them at gigiguel at yahoo.com about orders.



And though I'm aware Christmas was last month, I'm still posting some Christmas cupcakes because they are fun and festive:



And this was their September 2010 cupcake of the month, a caramel apple spice cupcake. "Honeycrisp apple cinnamon cupcake, caramel filling, whipped cream topping, fried apple chip garnish, and caramel drizzle"



Last but not least, some festive cupcake pops:

valentine's day Goat cheese frosting. Yes, really.

Would you believe this cupcake is topped with goat cheese frosting?



Well, it's true! Blogger Found Baking made apple spice cupcakes using a Martha Stewart recipe (get the recipe from her blog) and made goat cheese frosting to top them off!

She writes:

The cake uses apple sauce to bring that apple harvest flavor to life. I used unsweetened, organic apple sauce but you can certainly use a homemade apple sauce if you so please (Martha recommends it actually). For those who are not so keen on goat cheese, you can always opt to increase the amount of cream cheese (50/50 ratio with the goat cheese) in the frosting to make it more mellow.

valentine's day 5 frosting shots from Butter Lane: hazelnut chocolate, cranberry, blackberry, pumpkin and apple spice

I'd read that NYC's East Village cupcake bakery Butter Lane has new Thanksgiving frosting flavors and I wanted to check them out last night. I love their moist cakes, in vanilla, chocolate and banana, but at $3/cupcake, and after dinner, I was more in the mood just for the purity of the frosting. They do a great job with their frosting shots; they're $1/each and mine were very carefully prepared and packaged so as not to spill, plus they had garnishes on top.


5 frosting shots: Cranberry, Blackberry, Pumpkin Spice, Apple Spice, Hazelnut Chocolate (which is different from their other chocolate frostings)


hazelnut chocolate frosting shot closeup

Out of these, cranberry was far and away my favorite. It was a little tart but sweet as well, and refreshing. It very much tastes like cranberry, and the same for blackberry tasting like blackberry - if you like those fruits, check them out for sure. Pumpkin spice does have a bit of a kick, as does the apple spice, which was my least favorite of the five. The hazelnut chocolate was intense, in a good way, and the nut shavings added a little texture. They also have tiramisu frosting, but they told me that that wouldn't be so good as a standalone frosting shot because it works better on a cupcake so you get the full experience.

I think I've said this before, but unless you have an extremely high sugar tolerance, these are almost impossible to finish. I recommend bringing a friend or two; you really notice when eating frosting shots how rich frosting itself is, and how much the cupcake is actually the marriage of frosting and cake, and how each complements the other. What I like about Butter Lane is that because it's mix and match, you can ask them which cake would go best with which frosting, and they're happy to share their opinion.

They've also just launched a loyalty program using PlacePunch (more next week on other cupcake bakeries with loyalty programs). I'm not 100% sure how it works, but you can log in using Twitter, Facebook or Foursquare, and you get points for checking in, like this:





See more of my photos from last night in this Flickr set


sea salted chocolate frosting on vanilla cupcake

Visit them at Butterlane.com as well as Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook for the latest news. They offer cupcake classes twice a week.