Recipe Friday: Birthday Cake!

Last year at this time I was in labor.  I was really frustrated because I was supposed to be induced at 7 am, I thought for SURE my kids would be able to come and see the baby by lunch time, but Miss Olivia had other plans.  A year later that kid is STILL holding a grudge that we forced her out of the womb before she was good and ready and she wants to be in my arms at all times, day and night.  Yet another reason I'm mad I agreed to be induced.  So today I have a one year old and tomorrow I'm having a small first birthday party for our families at our house.

I decided to go with an Olivia theme (Ian Falconer's Olivia the pig) and I found super cute Olivia cupcakes on Nickjr.com.  Yesterday I baked the cupcakes, today I'm going to make the
ears and nose out of pink melting chocolate and tomorrow I'm going to frost them and assemble them.  After the Hall Of Fame parade, of course.

If you know me you know that I was BIG into cupcakes there for awhile.  I've gotten progressively lazier about birthdays the more kids I have, (I'm sure there's no correlation there!) but since it's Olivia's first, I kicked it into gear.  Not high gear, but maybe first or second.  I made her cupcakes from scratch as well as the frosting.  Lately I've been doing the boxed route and canned frosting (which, according to the experts, is actually better for cupcake building) but they just taste so gross I wanted to make something that actually TASTED good for this event.  So I'm sharing my recipe for Pound Cake Cupcakes.  ***WARNING*** this recipe is in NO WAY healthy or green!  It calls for 3/4 lb of butter.   It does, however, taste fantastic!  I was going to find a vegan cupcake recipe, but as I said, I didn't kick it into HIGH gear for this, just low.  There's always her second birthday.  Or Vince's 4th.  Or Ellie's 7th or Caden's 9th...uggghh parties galore!

Pound Cake Cupcakes

Ingredients:
18 cupcake liners
2 1/4 C all purpose flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
3 sticks unsalted butter at room temperature, cut into small pieces
1 1/2 C sugar
1 TBSP vanilla extract
6 large eggs

Directions:
1. Preheat oven to 325 degrees.  Place the liners in the wells of cupcake tins.
2. Whisk flour, baking powder and salt in a bowl to aerate and combine. Set aside.
3. In a large bowl with an electric mixer or the bowl of a stand mixer on medium-high speed, beat butter until creamy, about 4 minutes.  Add sugar gradually, beating until light and fluffy, about 4 minutes, scraping down the bowl once or twice.  Beat in vanilla extract.  Beat in eggs one at a time, scraping down after each addition, allowing each egg to be absorbed before continuing.  Add the flour mixture in 4 additions ,beating just until smooth on low-medium speed after each addition.
4.  Divide batter evenly among cupcake wells.  Bake for about 22 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the center shows a few moist crumbs.
5.  Cool pans on racks for 5 minutes, then remove cupcakes to cooling racks to col completely.