"The Dream"

I've named this "The Dream" for a couple of reasons - one, because it evokes memories of childhood, and all of the dreams that come along with childhood.  Second, because I am always dreaming of chocolate chip cookies - and this is my favorite cookie but with the airiness (and shape, and frosting) of a cupcake!

It was storming when I came home from work Friday afternoon, and we were let out 1.5 hours early due to the holiday.  I decided it was perfect weather for baking some cupcakes.

After the vanilla cupcake disaster of last week, I decided to spray my pans with Pam first.  However, I then found the liners to get kind of greasy.  Not sure I like that so much. 

Then I got my dry ingredients ready:

I love this whisk.  I own 4 whisks.  But I really want a nice, professional one like you see on all of the shows.

My microwave has all of these features, like "melt" and "soften" so I am always using it to soften my butter because I never remember (or plan ahead far enough in advance) to stick mine on the counter:

I also wanted to make cupcakes to use up this milk from last week.

Oh, how I love brown sugar, sugar and butter combined.  I could just eat it raw.  (I may have in the past, but I'll never admit to it.)

My secret ingredient - not so secret because I always tell everyone that this is my secret ingredient:

I put these babies in the oven, and then on to the clean up.  No one ever blogs about the clean up, you know?

 Gotta spray my baby down:

Has anyone else seen the new breast cancer kitchen aid from Williams Sonoma?  It is raspberry color and it is SO KICK ASS.  I really want it.  I want two.  Then I don't have to clean between batter and frosting.  And then I can have a kick ass hot pink kitchen aid.

So I looked up and saw that the timer said 10 minutes were up:

So I rotated those beautiful Williams Sonoma pans.  Do you know that before I started baking cupcakes I had never been in a Williams Sonoma?  What is wrong with me!  I hadn't yet lived!

Let me take this time to show you my favorite cooking tool, my Weber oven mitt.  I guess it's really a grill mitt, but its perfect!  The thumb is placed like a normal thumb placement so that you can actually grab things.  

So while these babies cool, it's on to the frosting.  (You'll notice none of them crested so I didn't need to spray the pans with Pam to begin with, but I guess it's better to be safe than sorry.)

I cheated on this step - I had some leftover frosting I had made on Monday night for my cake decorating class at Michael's (blog post about THIS to be coming soon) so I just used that.  I was so excited to use my new Tupperware mix-n-stor to get it ready for piping:

And to use my new trick of the cup being your bag holder:

And also to use my new "jumbo" tips from Ateco:

I knew that I wouldn't have a lot of frosting (for cupcakes you really need to make 2-3-4 batches of frosting to get them nice and piled high) so I did just a small dollop on each cake.  I think they are super cute and guess what?  They taste AMAZING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!   Light and airy like a cupcake, with the flavor of a chocolate chip cookie.  Yum, yum.