Here's a great idea: have a cupcake party! Sound silly? Really, it'll be fun. It's a lot cheaper than a night on the town, you can nurture your creative side and catch up with friends, and it's hard not to have fun while baking and decorating cupcakes. I recently did a cupcake workshop with a dozen students at my school, and though they had homework to do and papers to write, everyone just relaxed and had fun for a few hours. Huge dose of stress relief!
So invite some friends over, and tell them to bring along a hand mixer or two, some muffin tins, some sprinkles, maybe some M&M's, a jar of Nutella perhaps... Pair up, and make your cupcake batters. Then just keep filling and baking those cupcakes. Stick the muffin tins in the freezer or outside in the cold to cool off between rounds. A dozen of us made well over 200 hundred cupcakes in just a few hours. Once the batter is done, start making frosting while keeping a watchful eye on the cupcakes. When the frosting is done and the cupcakes are cool, put out all the frostings, sprinkles, and other decorations, and get creative!
At our cupcake event, we made 4 kinds of cake: peanut butter, chocolate, graham cracker, and brown sugar; 3 frostings: brown sugar cream cheese, vanilla frosting (in 4 colors), marshmallow. We also made chocolate ganache for filling the cupcakes and caramel to fill or drizzle over the cupcakes. But 2-3 varieties of cake and frosting is plenty, especially for a smaller group. Here are a couple recipes to get you started.
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