Baking Roundup and Cupcake Art

A couple of weeks ago I made some cupcakes for a friend's movie night.  I had some leftover mango puree in my freezer so I decided to go with a mango pineapple cake filled with passionfruit preserves topped with either a lime cream cheese frosting or an orange cream cheese frosting:
I used this hummingbird cake recipe from Chockylit, but I substituted 1/2 cup mango puree for each mashed banana and omitted the nuts.  I used her citrus cream cheese frosting recipe as well, making half a batch of lime and half a batch of orange.

This week I made some chocolate raspberry cupcakes filled with Nutella or mango preserves, topped with chocolate ganache:
I used Chockylit's chocolate goji berry cake recipe, but I substituted fresh raspberries for the dried goji berries.  I also used her chocolate ganache recipe, though I found it to be a bit too sweet and not rich enough for my tastes.  Some combination of the denseness of the cake and the denseness of the Nutella made it really difficult for me to get a lot of filling inside the cakes.  If I were to make these again, I'd definitely use the cone method of filling the cakes rather than my Bismark tip.

Two dozen of these cupcakes went to a 4th of July barbecue I went to, while the other dozen went to Ali Spagnola in exchange for this custom painting:



I totally love my new painting!!  Ali is a fantastic artist with an amazing project; she paints one painting every day and gives it away for free.  She's sent paintings all over the world (and doesn't charge her recipients for shipping!), but luckily she lives in Pittsburgh so we were able to arrange this cupcake-painting swap.  I'm looking forward to buying more paintings from her -- her robots are so cute!