One potato, two potato, three potato, cupcake!

So far this has been a very productive week in terms of baking. I promised my roomie, Portalnd, peanut butter frosting before she moved to Oregon, so that meant I had to come up with something to go with the peanut butter frosting. Don't get me wrong, in the process I ate about half of the frosting on its own, but I didn't think bringing a bowl of frosting and a bunch of spoons to work was going to go over so well. So after deciding against chocolate cake-ness (too expected and, really, not one of my favorite combos for cake and frosting) I did some research online and came across a bunch of recipes using banana cake. This looked promising, till I realized that it was Saturday....and I had to bake on Sunday....and there was no way that I was going to have over-ripe bananas that quick. So nix the bananas. But it led to a random recipe for applesauce cake...oooh! I like apples and peanut butter. And cinnamon. I like cinnamon. So I modified a favorite recipe and here are the results:

Aren't they cute!!!



...and delicious!

Several people at work were a little hesitant about the cinnamon and peanut butter (till they tried it and lovevd it), but it really added some depth to the frosting and the cake. All in all, absolute success.

Second episode of the week....I was approached today by Lady P (aka: my boss and the co-owner of the company) and asked to bake something for Owl's last day of work tomorrow. I was very excited about the whole conversation actually, basically L.P. offered to finance a fabulous state of the art bakery and pay me for it....and buy me a pony. Ok, not really any of that, but she did say that I had her support if I ever left my job to open a bakery, which is almost as good as that other stuff. Anyway, as a result of her offering to pay for any groceries I needed to bake for Owl, I decided to go with the dark chocolate hazelnut cupcakes I've been plotting lately. I'm totally thriilled with how they taste and look (dark chocolate hazelnut cake topped with Nutella and a piece of dark chocolate with hazelnuts in it), but I kinda misjudged their remove-ability-ness....that is to say, they don't come out of the wrappers so easy. But, messy eating aside, here they are:



It's a whole herd of them!



 I have 6 dozen of these....and 8 mini-loafs. I have a lot of chocolate. But, really, when is that a bad thing?