Extra-Crafty Coco Cake Cupcakes!

I love arts and crafts! I especially love the beautiful wave of arts and crafts that has been happening in the world and especially buzzing around in our cool city of Vancouver-- amazing women and men making crazy cool stuff, tired of spending their dollars at the mall buying mass produced and crappily made things, and wanting to offer their beautiful handcrafted goods to others to buy and enjoy. Got Craft is part of the coolness, and I was happy to be hired by Matchbox Creative to create a thank-you gift of chocolate with vanilla buttercream specialty-designed Coco Cake cupcakes for the Got Craft peeps!

So what kind of crafty cute little cupcakes would I make for the Got Crafters themselves? I decided to roll with super bright primary-ish colors to signify that sense of do-anything attitude we all had as kids; also the colors that are the building blocks of so many other colors, colors that inspire us to create! Also, how much do I love scallops? Tons and tons! (Not really the seafood type scallops, which one out of every four times will give me HIVES). Scallops, bright colors and super cute cupcake liners... and also some handy craftiness by yours truly: party flags made from old maps.

So everyone out there: Support your local art scene, and artisan craft scene! Yay!

Going Green: Green Tea Chocolate Cupcakes!

Do you love green tea flavoured things as much as I do? As a Chinese Canadian family growing up in Vancouver, we were always surrounded by loads of multicultural food and people-- we would often go out for Japanese food, which is probably where I first had green tea ice cream! I just love it, and I know I'm not alone. But I do know that there's the OPPOSITE camp, where people HATE green tea ice cream! To all the haters: "I ain't m'ad'atcha!" (Haha. See? Matcha? Me funny...??)

So introducing Coco Cake's latest flavour sensation... it's not a new flavour in the world of desserts or anything but I was happy to introduce it to my kitchen, and now to you: Green Tea Buttercream topped Chocolate Cupcakes! They are very pretty, no? I used my fancy matcha green tea powder from Muzi and it turned out nice and subtley matcha-y.

Yum yum yum. Green tea ice cream. Yum yum yum. Green tea chocolate cupcakes. Yum yum yum!

April Blim Art Market!

Coco Cake Cupcakes will once again be at the wonderful Blim Art Market, the last Sunday of every month at Cambrian Hall in Vancouver, E.17th Ave and Main Street. April 26, Sunday! Come on down to cupcake party town!

The Blim Art Mart has tons of fun stuff: vintage clothing, records, art, craft items, Japanese food, Blim's own awesome screenprinted clothing line, antique jewelry, local designer clothing... so much to do and see! This month will have the super awesome chanteuse Kellarissa performing too!

This month's yummy Coco Cake cupcake flavours:

Coco Chocolate Buttercream: chocolate cake with chocolate buttercream!
Lemon Love: luscious lemon cake with lemon creamcheese frosting!
Coconut Dream: coconut cake with creamcheese frosting and toasted coconut
Vegan Chocolate Raspberry: raspberry jam filled chocolate cake covered with ganache!
Vanilla Bean: yummy vanilla bean cake topped with vanilla buttercream
Chocolate Green Tea Buttercream: chocolate cake with green tea buttercream

Come early to avoid disappointment!

Order your COCO CAKE PARTY MIX BOX of 1 dozen of a mixture of the above flavours, for $36! Pre-order up until Saturday, April 25 at noon, for pick up at the market anytime between 11-5pm. Email me at lyndsay@cococake.com to order.

Hope to see you there...!

Chirpin' It Up!

Yellow canaries singing in my ear, made of vanilla cupcakes, vanilla buttercream and fondant. "Chirp! Chirp!" Vanilla buttercream rose-topped cupcakes too... Cindy Mochizuki is my crazy awesome fellow Asian Canadian friend who is a prolific Vancouver artist/animator/illustrator. She requested yellow canary cupcakes for her dad's birthday! Too cool! The little guy at the top is named "Go" which is the number 5 in Japanese, because this little character hatched fifth place on the day he was born. He is Cindy's parents' canary and this bird is too cool. He can sing on command, stop singing on command, fly around and return to his cage on command too. He's a real cool canary!

Blue 1980s Abstract Birthday Cake

So you know how whenever I make a cake it looks like it's for an 8 year old child? This cake is for a 28 year old man. Am I getting a bit better with the age-appropriate thing?? Of course I personally would love it if someone gave me a cake with a giant kawaii cat face or hilarious little panda bear cupcakes etc etc... and I'm 32... !!

My beautiful friend ShiShi requested a birthday cake for her man Scott's bday-- chocolate cake with yummy chocolate hazelnut filling, covered in fondant, with some sort of blue theme-- so I went with a kind of 1980s Max Headroom graphical vibe! Even though my instinct was to turn it into a blue whale face, heehee! Or a Pac Man ghost. I guess I'm on some weird 1980s nostalgia vibe lately... The top pic is the cake before it was covered in fondant. A cool trick to frosting a cake without getting buttercream all over your cake board is to tuck pieces of wax paper or parchment paper under your cake (which you can see in the pic), frost, then gently pull out the paper once you've frosted it and voila! Clean board! Ah, the little tricks that can help so much.

The pics of the cake after it's been sliced are from ShiShi!

Back to baking now!
xo