carrot cupcakes & cream cheese frosting

For my first attempt I went for a classic - carrot cake with cream cheese frosting. I used the recipe from Martha Stewart's Cupcakes book (my first cookbook of what I hope to be many, are you reading this Santa). They turned out decent but I am definitely going to need practice, for some reason I thought I might be a natural, ha!


An ice cream scoop is a great tool for making cupcakes, it makes it much easier to divvy up the batter and then you have an excuse to eat ice cream in the future, score!

So up until this point it was pretty painless, until I got to making the frosting...


See all those chunks/clumps in there? Martha would not be proud. What did I do wrong you ask? I broke the number one rule, I didn't follow the directions. Instead of mixing the ingredients in as instructed I mixed them in all at once, oops. I was forced to go out and buy a can of Betty Crocker frosting, I know, the shame!

Ta da! The finished product. I did half with toasted coconut and half without but I must say the ones with were the first to be snatched up by my co-workers. I can't offer any tips or tricks on these as I barely got through them myself. Practice makes perfect (we can only hope).

I desperately need to work on my decorating skills, I purchased a frosting bag which came with 5 assorted tips and I also bought some other goodies. Stay tuned to see if they improved my presentation!