More Birthday Baking

I enjoy making people desserts for their bdays :D. A couple weeks ago was Camilo's and due to the fact that he is totally amazing and that I feel endlessly guilty about my mass imposition on his living space, I definitely wanted to bake him delicious. He was very not picky and just requested some type of "cupcake," so I tried to choose something beyond awesome: cinnamon coffee cake. 

I am a huge proponent of anything snickerdoodle, so I was very confident in the choice. Things were going well, the recipe itself is pretty easy to follow. I am always careful to pick stuff on all recipes that is from scratch because it seems lame to me to doctor a cake mix :p. The batter was very yummy, and as I put the cakes in the oven, I was already congratulating myself on being awesome. 

Even though the recipe didn't call for it, I thought it would be a great idea to add on cream cheese frosting... because let's be honest, cream cheese frosting is pretty much never a bad thing. I found a simple recipe for the spread and whipped some up. Then I got inspired, why don't I make it cinnamon cream cheese?! How could this go wrong?? >: |. 

DO NOT PURCHASE

My mom always sends me giant boxes of random crap that I have nothing to do with. One such item was a Walmart's own "Great Value Imitation Cinnamon" extract. It came in a small bottle similar to vanilla. I was like, hey, why not? Faiiiiiiil. After a couple drops of this stuff, the whole room smelled like nasty fake cinnamon crap. I freaked out and tasted the large bowl of frosting... but the flavor had already penetrated the entire batch. I started adding in mass amounts of powdered sugar and regular cinnamon to counteract the flavor, but like nothing was working!! It was a tough battle, and I didn't decide to give up until the cupcakes were totally cooked and cooled. 

At first I thought that maybe it would be ok so I frosted the first cake. The smell alone made me know it was not worth it, and I decided to leave the rest dry. I had some cute little sugar decorations for them, so I risked using a drop of the frosting on each to glue them on. Even that was too much!!

All the frosting issue aside, the cupcakes were REALLY tasty :). They were very soft and home-made feeling. It was a terrific light cake with a subtle but very noticeable cinnamon-sugary flavor. I would definitely make these again any day, and this time be less ambitious with the frosting :P