This weekend is our annual Girls Weekend with my friends from high school/college.  I cannot wait!  Once a year for the past 13 (14?) years, the five of us travel from our respective geographic locations to convene at one of our homes for what we lovingly refer to as “Foodfest”.  We basically pick a “when” and “where” a few months in advance, then spend countless email hours planning the most important part–the menu.  Sometimes we pick a theme for our cuisine (e.g., make-your-own-pizzas, Mexican, finger foods/appetizers, etc.) and sometimes we just wing it (like this year).  We may or may not have also incorporated certain party themes in years past (e.g., New Kids on the Block, Totally ‘80s, Michael Jackson’s “Black or White”) to the embarrassment of our husbands/significant others.  No matter what, the food is always the focus of the weekend!

For whatever reason, this year’s menu was all over the place.  We waited until the last second to plan (despite the fact that we picked the date 4 months in advance), then none of us could decide what to bring (and there was no theme for guidance).  To make life easier, I went with two old standbys:  chocolate chip cookies (at the request of my good friend, Katie) and funfetti cookies (to satisfy my own craving).

The first time I had funfetti cookies was on Easter around 5 years ago.  I live 5 hours away from my family, so I never go home for Easter since it’s on a Sunday.  My husband is Jewish, so his family doesn’t celebrate.  That leaves us alone for the holiday, and I always do my best to make it special.  That year, we invited our friends Sara (a member of the Foodfest crew) and Jordan over for Easter dinner.  I made lasagna and all the fixings, and Sara brought dessert, introducing me to funfetti cookies for the first time!  I was in love.  Deeply.  We all know I love cake.  And frosting.  And now I can have cake and frosting packaged in a neat little cookie that I can make in less than an hour.  I am forever in your debt, Sara!

Funfetti cookies are seriously simple.  Four ingredients.  Mix, bake, frost, eat.  That’s it.  You can even go the super-lazy route and just drop the cookies onto the cookie sheet instead of rolling into balls and flattening with a glass.  The super-lazy route gives you a thicker, less uniformly shaped cookie.  They are delicious either way.  Confession:  I almost always take the super-lazy route, but today I did the flattening thing so I could decorate the cookies for Halloween.

The other great thing about funfetti cookies is the price.  You can almost always find the cake mix and frosting on sale, so you only need to spend a few dollars to make cookies everyone will love.  Plus you can buy an extra cake mix and frosting when they are on sale to have on hand for unexpected baking occasions (you know, like Saturdays).  I think Pillsbury caught onto this, because they now sell a specific “Funfetti Cookie” mix, which costs more than the funfetti cake mix and doesn’t make as many cookies.  Don’t fall for their trap–just buy the cake mix.

Note:  This was the first time I used chocolate frosting on funfetti cookies.  I used it for looks and because I had a can of chocolate frosting open already in the fridge.  Chocolate frosting is my favorite, but I am proclaiming that funfetti cookies are better with vanilla frosting.  That’s just my humble opinion though.  Try both for yourself!

Funfetti Cookies

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Yield: 24 cookies

Serving Size: 1 cookie

Ingredients

• 1 pkg Pillsbury Funfetti cake mix
• 1/3 cup vegetable oil
• 2 eggs
• 1/2 (15.6 oz) can Pillsbury Funfetti vanilla frosting
• Decorations—candy, sprinkles, food coloring, etc.

Instructions

1. Heat oven to 375°F.
2. In a large bowl, combine cake mix, oil and eggs. Stir with a rubber spatula until thoroughly moistened.
3. Using your hands, shape dough into 1-inch balls. Place 2 inches apart on ungreased cookie sheets.
4. Dip the flat bottom of a glass in flour and use it to flatten each ball, dipping in flour as needed.
5. Bake 6 to 8 minutes or until edges are light golden brown.
6. Cool on cookie sheet for 1 minute, then remove to wire rack and cool completely.
7. Once cookies are completely cooled, decorate as desired using frosting and sprinkles.

Notes

Instead of rolling the dough into balls and flattening with a glass, you can drop the dough by tablespoonfuls 2 inches apart onto cookie sheets. This gives you thicker, less uniformly shaped cookies. They are delicious either way.

Adapted from Pillsbury Funfetti Cookies

2.6

http://www.sweetsbeforeeats.com/funfetti-cookies/

Most families spend the weeks before Halloween up to their shoulders in pumpkin guts.  I prefer frosting and candy.  Pumpkin carving is awesome, but my family’s go-to Halloween tradition is decorating cupcakes.  Don’t be fooled–-it’s just as messy as carving pumpkins, but it’s a lot more fun licking frosting from your fingers than pumpkin innards.  This tradition began several years ago when my mother mailed us a package of Halloween-themed goodies–napkins, cups, candy and cupcake liners.  I just had to use those cupcake liners…and the rest is history.  This is where our creativity flourishes.  After all, we have 24 chances to decorate the perfect treat with designs running the gamut from cutesy (mine), to imaginative (both Jay and Jake) to downright gross (like Jay’s bleeding witch, crushed by her own hat).  Disgusting or adorable, they all taste delicious!

Cupcakes are one of my favorite desserts (and meals…), but I don’t make them nearly often enough (because I will single-handedly eat them all!)  As a result, when Halloween cupcake time rolls around, I tend to go all out–searching online for inspiration and techniques, shopping for decorating materials, scouring Long Island for the always necessary “bones” candies.  Last year I found these great bloody bones candies, but could not find them anywhere this year, and the thought of ordering them online didn’t occur to me until now–too late!  A last-minute trip to Michael’s resulted in plain old white bones and black and white skulls.  Jay and Jake were disappointed with the non-gruesome bones, but I fell in love with my adorable skeleton cupcake (is he doing the macarena?).

I found there are two types of people in this world:  those of us who love box mix cakes, and those who scoff at those of us who love box mix cakes.  (Can’t we all just get along? We’re talking CAKE here, people.)  I grew up with box mix cake, and love the batter almost as much as the finished product.  However this year I made it my mission to make cupcakes from scratch.  But with so many yellow cake recipes out there, how could I be sure the recipe I picked wouldn’t disappoint?  Easy.  I googled “yellow cake recipe that tastes like box mix”.  Unfortunately that just resulted in heated debates arguing the merits of “box vs. scratch” cakes and commenters lamenting the fact that scratch recipes didn’t produce the same taste/texture/warm fuzzy feeling the box mix does.  Through numerous cyber twists and turns, I came across this yellow cake recipe From Karen’s Kitchen, and, despite the fact that I didn’t have cake flour or buttermilk (and I loathe buying ingredients that aren’t standard in my pantry), I decided to give it a try.  I was impressed.  The recipe was simple and yummy!  Did it taste like a box mix?  No.  Did I care? Not at all!  The cupcakes were fluffy and flavorful.  I even ate an unfrosted cupcake for breakfast (sweets before eats, baby!).  Maybe they were more dense than a box mix, but that worked to our advantage since we loaded them up with frosting and candy.

Now that I had homemade cupcakes, it seemed a sin to use store-bought frosting.  Confession #2–I love store-bought frosting.  I have a couple good frosting recipes, but I associate them with cut-out sugar cookies and very detailed decorated cakes.  They aren’t the type of frosting you slather onto cupcakes.  Once again, Google to the rescue!  Or not.  I happened upon chocolate and vanilla frosting recipes that looked like they would do the trick.  Spoiler alert–they didn’t.  I followed the recipes to a T, but the results were less than ideal.  I wasn’t about to ruin everything I love about cupcakes just to follow some self-imposed rule that a homemade cupcake deserves homemade frosting, so I did what I had to do–bought Duncan Hines classic vanilla frosting and dark chocolate fudge frosting.  They were creamy and smooth, thick enough to decorate with but not crunchy.  The look and taste were exactly what I was going for!

One more note before we get to the yellow cupcake recipe.  I use Wilton Icing Colors to color my frosting.  I don’t notice any taste from it, and it doesn’t thin out the frosting.  Also it produces bold vibrant colors that refuse to be ignored!

Yellow Cake Cupcakes

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Yield: 25 - 27 cupcakes

Serving Size: 1 cupcake

Ingredients

• 4 large eggs
• 1 cup buttermilk
• 1 tablespoon vanilla extract
• 2 cups sugar
• 3 cups cake flour, sifted prior to measuring
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, at room temperature
• Frosting and decorations of your choice

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 350°F. Line two muffin tins with cupcake liners.
2. In a medium bowl, whisk eggs and 1/4 cup buttermilk. Stir in vanilla.
3. In a large bowl, combine the sugar, cake flour, baking powder and salt. Beat with an electric mixer (I use an electric hand mixer) on low speed for 30 seconds to combine.
4. Add the butter and remaining 3/4 cup buttermilk to the large bowl containing the dry ingredients. Beat on low speed until the dry ingredients are moistened, then beat on medium speed for 1 1/2 minutes.
5. Add the egg and buttermilk mixture in three additions to the large bowl containing all other ingredients, beating for 20 seconds after each addition.
6. Scrape sides of bowl and beat an additional 15 seconds.
7. Spoon the batter into the prepared muffin tins, filling each 2/3 to 3/4 full. (I used a medium cookie scoop to fill the muffin tins, using slightly more than one scoop of batter for each cupcake.)
8. Bake 15-25 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in center comes out clean.
9. Remove cupcakes from muffin tins, and cool completely on a wire rack.
10. Once the cupcakes are completely cooled, frost and decorate as desired.
11. Enjoy!

Notes

Adapted From Karen's Kitchen Yellow Cake

2.6

http://www.sweetsbeforeeats.com/yellow-cake-cupcakes/