The Bake-n-Blog Cupcake Extravaganza is here!!

The big day has arrived!! It’s time for Staci Edwards Design’s Bake-n-Blog Extravaganza!! Staci came up with the delicious idea for bloggers to select a recipe from the web site Ming Makes Cupcakes, bake a batch of their selected cupcakes, and then blog about them. I selected the Graham Cupcakes with Key Lime Cream Cheese Frosting.I chose this recipe for a few reasons — first off, hello, cream cheese icing?!?! YUM!!!!!! And I love lime. And I was intrigued by the concept of a cupcake with graham cracker crumbs actually IN the batter. And all the ingredients are things I either already have or will use in the future. And they sounded easy enough to make!! Taking a picture of each step added to the time required to make them, but I’m sure you could whip up a batch pretty quick.

So here we go… Kelly makes Ming Makes Cupcakes Graham Cupcakes with Key Lime Cream Cheese Frosting. Wow,that’s a mouthful!!

1. Gather the ingredients.

2.  Sift the flour, baking powder, and salt into a large bowl.

3. Making graham cracker crumbs the old fashioned way!!

4. Adding graham cracker crumbs to the flour mixture.

At this point, I realized that I was going to have to use the mixer to mix in the butter. So, out came the ancient KitchenAid…

5. Mixing the butter into the dry ingredients.

6. Adding the sugar.

7. Mixing in the eggs.

8. Measuring the vanilla and milk. Forgot to get a shot pouring of them going into the mixing bowl.

9. The batter is ready!! And being a batter freak, I had to try a little sample… YUM!! This is probably really weird, but I love eating batter more than eating the final product!!

10. Muffin tin with empty cupcake liners.

11. Muffin tin with filled cupcake liners. The recipe makes exactly 12 cupcakes, even with me sneaking a bit of batter to eat :-)

12. Cupcakes are almost ready!!

13. And voila, 12 baked cupcakes :-)

Now on to the best part — cream cheese icing!!

14. Softened butter and cream cheese cubed and waiting in the mixing bowl.

15. Fresh-squeezed lime juice. Confession — I didn’t use key limes. I had 5 limes in the fridge, so I used one of them. Hey, at least I used real lime juice and not juice out of a bottle!!

16. In goes the lime juice.

17. In goes the icing sugar.

18. Mixing the icing. I had a sudden brainstorm at this point. My very favourite cream cheese icing has an extra ingredient — melted white chocolate. So I decided to add some white chocolate to the lime cream cheese icing (about 2 ounces).

All done!! I could have eaten the entire bowl of icing with a spoon. Whenever my mom made carrot cake when I was a kid, she’d always say we should just skip the cake and eat the icing!!

I put the icing in the fridge to firm it up a bit before I frosted a cupcake for me and a cupcake for hubby. I topped them off with graham cracker crumbs and thin slices of lime.

My cupcake :-P

My half-eaten cupcake :-)

Hubby eating his cupcake… (yes, he has WAY too much chest hair!!)

One last big bite!!

All gone!!

And the final verdict??

YUM-A-LICIOUS!!!!!!!

These are some seriously yummy cupcakes. The tops are a little bit crunchy, and the insides are light and moist. And the icing… MMMMMMMMM, the icing!!!!!! Love the combination of the cream cheese icing with the lime. And this recipe makes enough icing for a lot more than 12 cupcakes. So, break out the spoon and enjoy!! :-)

And on a related note, I picked up 12 of these silicone cupcake liners in Nova Scotia:

I think they’re a great idea because you can use them over and over — much more economical and environmentally friendly than paper liners. You can check them out on the Danesco web site.

Be sure to head over to Staci’s blog to check out all the other cupcake reviews in the Bake-n-Blog Extravaganza. And then get out your baking gear, ‘cause I bet you’ll want to try them all!! :-)