Love Those Polka Dots!

I ordered some vinyl polka dots from Say It Your Way Vinyl (see http://www.facebook.com/YourWayVinyl   and  http://www.yourwayvinyl.com/) for my daughter's bedroom.  The polka dots turned out awesome, don't you think?  The quality and price were great, too.  I love the idea of vinyl polka dots, because if my 13-year-old outgrows them...we can easily remove them.  It was a lot easier than painting the circles just right, too.

We all love chocolate around here, and since we are absorbed in a polka dot theme, we decided to make some chocolate cupcakes. We looked for gluten-free frosting to purchase to try to get the pink and brown colors just right for the polka dots.  (I don't know about you, but when I try to use the basic food coloring kit to come up with brown it ends up looking kind of gross. :)  I started reading labels and found out that Wilton cake decorating products have wheat. 

Here is a photo of some polka dot cupcakes we made.  I bought a King Arthur's Gluten-free Chocolate Cake Mix (which is awesome...I would rate it 10 out of 10),



and we added Hershey's S'mores Dessert Icing (which was fun and easy to work with...I would rate it at 8 out of 10 for workability, but 6 out of 10 for taste.  It tasted like pina colada instead of chocolate.)

(Photo source:  amazon.com)

and Cake Mate Pink Frosting (too sweet, but fairly easy to work with, so 7 out of 10).

(Photo source:  bing.com/images)

We used the recipe from my cookbook for Fluffy Frosting for the main coating of frosting.

Fluffy Frosting

4 cups powdered sugar

¼ cup water

¾ cup shortening

½ teaspoon almond flavoring

½ teaspoon butter flavoring

½ teaspoon vanilla

Pink food coloring (opt.)

Whip ingredients with hand mixer until well mixed.

It was fun to make these cupcakes, and our daughters had a great time decorating some of the cupcakes.  I must admit, none of us could eat a whole cupcake at one time because the cupcakes were too sweet with all of that frosting!  However, we found that if we sectioned off a little piece at a time...it worked out just fine. :)