Cupcake Sunday: Beehive Cupcakes and Mini Pear and Walnut Cupcakes

I left you all last week with the mental image of me on the floor in front of the fridge and a teaser shot of the cupcakes that I made last weekend. Now that a week has gone by and I've been remiss in my blogging, I thought it was time I got off my lazy butt and posted like I should have done a week ago.

Last weekends cupcake was called a Beehive Cupcake.  It was a honey cupcake that had a yellow meringue frosting piped on in the shape of beehives.  The cupcake itself started off more like a chocolate chip cookie base (creaming together butter and brown sugar) than a cupcake base.

Now I don't know how many of you have made a meringue frosting before, but I never had.  I used to watch my grandma make it to put onto shortcake, but I'd never attempted it myself.  I was running a little low on eggs, so instead of wasting the yolks, I thought I would use the egg beaters egg whites that were in the fridge.  The container says 100% egg white, so I figured it would work the same... WRONG.  I sat there and beat those egg whites like they deserved it, and nothing... no white fluffy goodness.  Not even a substantial amount of bubbles that could lie and say they were meringue.    So yeah, I not only wasted egg beaters, I had to use the real egg whites anyway.  As C would say, lesson learned.  When I finally got it right, the frosting was A-M-A-Z-I-N-G.  It's like the younger, prettier sister of the fluff that you get in the jar at the grocery store.  The jarred fluff wishes it could be like my fluff (...that sounds kinda wrong...).

The recipe called for foil wrapped bees, but let's be honest.... the closest I was going to get to finding foil wrapped bees were the bees that Squirt catches in the backyard.  Who thinks of these things?

This week's cupcake (mini Pear and Walnut Cupcakes) was equally delightful.  The best part?  I already had almost everything I needed on hand to make them.  All I had to buy was a can of pears and a small bag of walnut pieces.  Rock on.  I love when that happens because it makes me feel like a girl scout - always prepared.  The cupcake started off similar to last week's cupcake, but instead of folding in honey at the end, I had to fold in chopped up pear and walnuts. 

The frosting on these was like a little bit of Wisconsin in my mouth.  One of my best friends, B, has a significant other who is from them thar parts.  Said boy has an uncle who has a tree that made the maple syrup that went into the icing.  D-lightful.  I love knowing where my ingredients came from! (Side note - I've almost gone through the ginormous jar she gave me and that makes me only completely sad.)  C liked these almost as much as last week's cupcakes, but seriously, what can compete with marshmallow fluff?  That's right... nothing.