Mint & Cherry Cupcakes With #CoolWhipFrosting #Cbias

I am a member of the Collective Bias Social Fabric Community. This content has been compensated as part of a social shopper insights study for Collective Bias and Kraft Cool Whip. #CoolWhipFrosting #cbias #SocialFabric

Earlier in the week, I showed you photos of my new office, which we just finished renovating. 2013 marks ten years since we started renovating this house (!!), and in a few months we’ll have most of our major projects wrapped up. It feels so good complete these projects – having a proper office for my business has been in the cards for so long and got really delayed by my knee injury.

Now that I’ve closed this chapter, I wanted to celebrate and show off my pretty new room to everyone, so I decided to throw an “Open house” and invite friends and family over to check out our handiwork. For refreshments, I decided to serve cupcakes, since I’m famous for making them and thought it would go smashingly with afternoon coffee! And since I painted the room turquoise and pink, I’m clearly not afraid of color, so I thought it would be really fun to decorate the cupcakes to match my new room! I decided to make turquoise cupcakes to match the wall, and pink cupcakes to match the trim. To make the flavor match the color, I planned on making the cupcakes mint and cherry flavored, respectively. So I headed up to Walmart to pick up all the baking supplies for my project – for a full recap of my shopping trip and what I bought, click here to view my Google+ album.

Mint Cupcakes:

For the first batch of cupcakes, I made Silver White Cake using a recipe from my favorite vintage 1969 cookbook. I added 1 teaspoon of pure peppermint extract to the original recipe and added blue food coloring with a dash of green to match the turquoise walls in my office. As you can see here, I mixed the cake next to the wall for color comparison!

Next, I popped open a tub of Cool Whip Frosting and added the food coloring to match the cupcakes. This was my first time trying this frosting, and it has a really nice, soft consistency for easy spreading. I usually make my frosting from scratch too so it’s really nice to save a step and just open a tub! Easy peasy!

Cherry Cupcakes:

For the cherry cupcakes, I made this Cake Boss Sponge Cake recipe. I was looking for a sponge cake that didn’t call for a lot of ingredients, and this one fit the bill. It turned out really nice – I substituted margarine for butter, and added red food coloring this time to match the pink trim in my office. I also poured off the syrup from a jar of Maraschino cherries, an old trick I’ve used to add flavor to cakes before. I poured out about 1/3 of the syrup in the jar because I wanted to make sure it had a nice flavor, but I think next time I might use a little less just because it does thin out the batter. The recipe didn’t advise how long to bake it for when making cupcakes, so I just guessed around 20 minutes – I can’t tell you the exact amount of time because I forgot to hit the button on my timer, doh! So, I just took them out when they were done. 😉

Speaking of batter, here’s a little trick for spooning out runny cupcake batter: Try an ice cream scooper! It was still messy, but it was easier than using a spoon.

After the cherry cupcakes finished baking, I opened a second tub of Cool Whip Frosting, added food coloring until I got a nice pink shade, and decorated the cupcakes with the frosting and a cherry on top. Yum!

Party Time!

Once all the cupcakes were baked and decorated, it was party time! I set out a card table in the office with coffee, tea, and a platter of cupcakes. I also put cupcakes on the shelves and windowsills to match the paint – it looked so fun, like a candy shop!

Here I am, ready to serve cupcakes to my guests!

Between the way I swirled the frosting on the cupcakes and the color, they looked just like the texturing on the walls behind them! In fact, when the party was over and I was packing up the leftover cupcakes, I almost missed a few on the shelves because they blended in so well…ha!

My grandma and aunt Kim stopped by to check out the new room, and they were impressed with the decorating that I did in the room and cupcakes! 😉 Both the cake recipes tasted good with the flavor additions I made – both Jai and Kim said they were “The best cupcakes ever” at different times! My aunt also asked me where to find the Cool Whip Frosting because she liked it so well that she wanted to pick up some to use herself. We all liked the fact that the frosting was fluffy and had a nice flavor without being sickly sweet, like a lot of frostings are.

One of my friends missed the cupcake party because she was at school, but she was coming over for a movie later that night, so I decided to leave the cupcakes in the office so she could enjoy some when she got here. She enjoyed the cupcakes too, and I got this great photo of her using the cupcakes as goggles!

To learn more about Cool Whip Frosting, click here to visit them on Facebook! You can also print off a coupon for 75 cents off by clicking on the widget below. This saved me some cash when I was making my cupcakes!