I had an order for one of my personal favorites, red velvet cupcakes. For those of you unfamiliar with red velvet, it is a buttermilk cake, tinted red, with a hint of cocoa. The buttermilk helps make the cake really moist and soft. It satisfies those chocolate-sweet cravings without being too much.

Traditionally, it’s paired with cream cheese frosting, which I find extremely delicious, but I’ve also seen variations in either a white chocolate or chocolate frosting. I made a light milk chocolate buttercream for my cupcakes and was really pleased with the result.

I also punched out some fondant circles (aka wafers, a la Martha Stewart) and stamped them with the letter “D”, to celebrate the birthday girl monogram-style. Of course to do this required clean, unused stamps and a trip to Michael’s Crafts revealed quite the upgrade in stampery…they make clear stamps now that allow you to create your very own stamps in endless combinations! Quite the find and definitely something to consider for future personalized projects.

A few days later I was making miniature-size cupcakes from a yellow cake batter enhanced with ground ginger. This time I topped them with a bittersweet chocolate buttercream and sprinkles, of course, since they were cupcakes and they were indeed created for a birthday celebration, so it was only fitting. Yellow cake with chocolate frosting seems to be an American birthday classic.  I was very impressed with the chocolate buttercream experimentations this week, they tasted even better than I had predicted!

Of course, once the cupcake production ceased I had time to do other things, like pay a visit to one of the farmer’s markets on Wednesday. I keep returning to buy organic blueberries, which happened to be just right last week: large, firm, and sweet.

We had some ricotta cheese leftover in the fridge so I channeled Tyler Florence and plopped a few spoonfuls in the food processor along with some lemon zest and powdered sugar, just to sweeten it up a bit. The blueberries were sugared and slowly simmered in a pot with some strawberries, raspberries, and fresh lemon juice until soft and compote-like, about 12 minutes.

A few spoonfuls of the berries over the lemon ricotta mixture with a chocolate wafer (leftover from ice cream sandwich-making) and you have yourself the quintessential summer dessert: light, fruity, fresh.

I finished off my weekend with herbal tea and freshly baked croissants (pain au chocolat for my mom), because I have missed them eating them in pastry school.

This week I am looking forward to creating an assortment of petit fours for my mom’s book club. More to come on this later!