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This, my friends, is the “I’d Have a Caesar” cupcake. 

When we watched Letterkenny the first time through, we looked at each other and asked a very important question: 

“What the hell is a Caesar?” 

And the answer, we found, is that a “Caesar” is, of course, an alcoholic drink: essentially, it is a Bloody Mary made with clamato juice instead of just straight up tomato juice.

And the question became: how do you turn that into a cupcake? 

For anybody else, the short answer would have been “You don’t. That sounds gross.” 

But while @dettiot​ was super excited for the Super Soft Birthday Party cupcake, @wonderlandleighleigh​ was most excited for this one (she’s really into the weird stuff!). 

We adapted this recipe by splitting the amount of crushed tomatoes we used with clamato juice.

Be aware that you may have to add a little more flour to your batter to make sure it’s not too too runny, but ours didn’t need that, so you never know! Just keep an eye out. We also used fresh basil from our garden, but any ol’ basil will work.

Clamato is an odd flavor. If you’re not familiar, it is literally tomato and clam juice mixed together. Some people probably make their own (clam broth, tomato juice), but uh...while we like adventure, this is not one we were prepped for.

Enter Clamato juice! It comes in a jolly little bottle that looks like this: 

And it tastes pretty funky if you’re not prepped for it.

Or even if you are prepped for it.

Its availability probably depends on how popular seafood is in your area (we live in Baltimore. If you don’t like crab here, the local government will politely ask you to leave before the locals find out).

Likewise, living in Maryland, the perfect spice presented itself to put in the frosting. The perfect balance for a clamato cake: 

 Love, it, hate it, however you feel about Old Bay, it exists, and it’s a Maryland favorite.

For the frosting: 

8 oz of cream cheese, 1 stick of butter, 3+ cups of powdered sugar, and however much Old Bay you want. To really get the flavor, you’ll need at least a tablespoon and a half, we think. But uh... @wonderlandleighleigh​ is a Maryland girl through and through, so you may want to take that into consideration if you try it.

The end result is...surprisingly good! Savory to be sure, but pleasant enough. We had a few taste testers who were pretty impressed with it overall, so we’ll call this one a win!

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While the Pilot episode of Letterkenny, “Ain’t No Reason to Get Excited,” is an excellent set-up, its second outing has gone down as one of the best episodes of the series.

“Super Soft Birthday Party” focuses on Wayne and Katy’s yearly obsession with throwing Darryl a birthday party filled with feather boas, horses dressed as unicorns, and cupcake decorating. 

To wit, we bring you The Super Soft Birthday Party cupcake! It’s a white cake (recipe found here) and filled with sprinkles (scoop out cupcake innards, use a half tablespoon to fill with your choice of sprinkles). Then it’s topped with a strawberry champagne cream cheese frosting: half-stick of butter, half a block of cream cheese, a handful of frozen strawberries chopped in a food processor and a healthy glug of the softest sparkling wine or champagne you can find.

The result is a fluffy cake and a silky frosting. Perfect for making your super soft birthday party the softest ever. 

Just uh...don’t tell Wayne there’s cream cheese in the frosting. It tends to end badly for the cupcake.

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Letterkenny gets a lot of its laughs from repetition, and one of the most-heard phrases on the show is “Get This Guy a Fuckin’ Puppers,” used to indicate that someone needs to either calm down or stop being a pretentious fuckface.

Puppers, for those not in the know, is the beer that our dear hicks love the most. You can even buy some for yourself!

...

In Canada. 

We’re in Baltimore, so that wasn’t really an option, so far as we could tell. We had to improvise. 

For the Get This Guy a Fuckin’ Puppers Cupcake, we made a chocolate stout cake using a can of Guinness (link to the recipe is here), and as usual, @wonderlandleighleigh snuck in more booze than the recipe called for in, because she just can’t help herself. It produces an extremely fudgey and delicious cake! 

The frosting is a simple whipped cream, or “shneef” (Shnif!): Heavy cream and a tablespoon of granulated sugar in your hand/stand mixer on high with your whisk attachment until soft peeks form. You can’t really tell in the photo, but we sprinkled some sparkly white sprinkles on top to make it look...well...like it could be a pile of shneef. 

The end result is nothing fancy, but it is delicious. Which is what we were going for.

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How Are Ya Now?

Letterkenny is one of those shows that you can only discover by accident and then binge in a trance-like state until it’s all over and two things have happened:

1. It’s so weird that you’re in love with it.

2. You wonder why there isn’t more.

Letterkenny is a strange one. It’s not for everybody, and you HAVE to watch it with the subtitles on (especially if you’re not Canadian). It’s weird, a little gross (How many times did Wayne and Dary say “Cunt” in that one episode?), but it can also be incredibly heartwarming and inclusive at the same time.

Think “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”, but like…rural and Canadian.

Well, we’re all in luck, because Hulu’s got season 7 out on the 14th! 

To celebrate the arrival of season 7 on Hulu October 14th (that’s tomorrow!), we made three cupcakes we feel embody the spirit of our favorite hicks, hockey players, skids and...well...Glenn. 

Get This Guys a Fuckin’ Puppers: a chocolate stout cupcake with a whipped cream frosting and sparkly sugar *shneef” on top.

The Super Soft Birthday Party: A white cupcake filled with sprinkles, topped by a strawberry champagne cream cheese frosting.

I’ll Have a Caesar: a Clamato basil cupcake with an Old Bay cream cheese frosting.

Ferda. 

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Coming up on Bake Nerdy For Me...

Ferda...

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We hope you’ve enjoyed our first round of Bake Nerdy For Me! Supernatural really is one of our favorite things. We’ve both watched since about season 3, and it’s very near and dear to us.

The fact that it’s coming to a close is a huge deal, not just for us, but for millions of other fans out, there. So stay tuned! We just might put together a second round SPN themed goodies. Chuck knows there’s enough ideas throughout the last 15 years of show to make it happen!

We had a hecka good time putting this together, and we’re super stoked to get going on more!

Coming up on Bake Nerdy For Me: 

Letterkenny The Batfamily Parks and Recreation  Community Doctor Who The MCU

And way more!

Thanks for following along! <3

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Supernatural would not be Supernatural if not for its most prominent bad guys: 

The demons.

From ol’ Yellow Eyes right on down the line to the King of the Crossroads himself, demons have been a an enormous part of the show since the very first season.

And so we saluted the soulless fuckers with a cupcake of their very own, The Demon Blood Cupcake! Devil’s food cake with a cherry preserves center and a cayenne buttercream frosting.

It’s sweet and rich and spicy and tart all at the same time. Like Crowley...but maybe not like other demons. ;)  

The Devil’s food cake recipe came from @dettiot‘s beloved Betty Crocker cookbook (the red plaid one with the ring binder). Here’s the info:

3 eggs 2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour 1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder 1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda 1/4 teaspoon salt 1/2 cup shortening 1 3/4 cups sugar 1 teaspoon vanilla 1 1/3 cups cold water

Bring eggs to room temperature and set oven to preheat at 350 degrees.

In a medium bowl, stir together flour, cocoa powder, baking soda and salt; set aside.

In your stand mixer, beat shortening on medium to high speed for 30 seconds. Add sugar and vanilla; beat until well combined. Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition.

Alternate adding flour mixture and water to the shortening mixture, beating on low speed until just combined. Pour batter into prepared pans (round cake tins, a sheet pan, or cupcake pan). 

Bake for 25-30 minutes for round cake tins, 30-35 minutes for sheet pan, or 15-20 minutes for cupcakes, or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Cool on wire racks for ten minutes, then remove from pan and cool completely. 

Makes 12-16 servings. 

We store bought our cherry preserves but if you’ve got the bug to make your own, cherries, sugar and pectin will probably do ya. The buttercream is pretty standard (1 stick butter, 3ish cups powdered sugar, splash of milk), and we added cayenne powder to taste. Mileage may vary on just how spicy you want your buttercream. @wonderlandleighleigh is notorious for swapping the cayenne with chipotle powder to get a more smoky flavor. Either way, it’s super tasty. 

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Cookie Formula by dinabelenko

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The Dean “Me Likey” Winchester Cupcake is not a totally unexpected combination. Even if we didn’t identify as long-time, ride-or-die Dean!girls, a combination befitting the elder Winchester brother’s personality wouldn’t have been hard to come up with. 

Dean likes what he likes, and whiskey and pie are two of the biggies. If the creators and showrunners of Supernatural had wanted to, they could have centered all 15 seasons of the show around one man’s quest to eat pie. A lot of pie. 

Just how much does Dean like pie?

We’ll let him tell you:

While it would have been simple to infuse a buttercream with whiskey, we went a little differently, here, making a whiskey cake. Instead of Jack Daniel’s Honey Whiskey, though, we used Basil Hayden’s small batch whiskey. We can’t recommend using nice alcohol in your cooking enough. It makes a big difference!

It’s not a very sweet cake, and while relatively cakey, it tastes a little like a beer bread. Theoretically, you’d think that would be a problem, but it was really good, and the whiskey really came through! But keep in mind that @wonderlandleighleigh was uh...a little heavy-handed with the hooch here. 

For the frosting, we wanted something on the sweet side that would counter the heavy whiskey flavor of the cake, but a cherry flavor to represent Dean’s very-favorite pie had the potential to be too tart a combo (an experiment for another day). 

We went with another classic Apple, by making a simple buttercream (2 sticks of butter, 3 or more cups of powdered sugar, a drizzle of milk, place all ingredients in a mixing bowl and using a stand/handmixer to beat together until smooth and delightful), and flavoring it with apple butter.

How much is entirely up to you, just be mindful, as apple butter is a “wet” ingredient, and can make your frosting a little too goopy instead of smooth.

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The Sam Winchester Diet Cupcake

Sam Winchester is well-known for making a concerted effort to eat at least vaguely healthy. With a lifestyle that, up until season 8, involved a lot of suspect gas station fare, it’s understandable that he’d want to at least TRY for something that won’t kill him.

Sam orders egg white omelets at diners and sometimes replaces a handful of Dean’s beers in the cooler with healthy green smoothies. 

But we also know that Sam still enjoys a few of those bad-for-you-foods, and while he probably doesn’t get cupcakes often (Sam’s a big dude. Like a BIG dude. Imagine him holding a tiny cupcake), we think he’d probably at least try for something with a modicum of nutritional value.

Hence a carrot cake cupcake, with a cinnamon clove cream cheese frosting. 

 We snagged our carrot cake recipe from here, and while we mostly followed the cream cheese recipe provided, we (and by that, we mean @wonderlandleighleigh) don’t believe in regulating how much spice should or should not go into a recipe. So we recommend adding those “to taste.” 

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Castiel’s Jelly-Not-Jam Cupcake! 

We’re not going to lie here, Cass’ cupcake base was a no-brainer. It had to be angel food cake. What else could it possibly be for everybody’s favorite angel of the lord? 

Neither of us had ever made angel food before, so we were a little bit novice-y, and some of the cakes came out a tiny bit overdone. But that was okay, because we had plenty that were wonderful! Just watch your time on the recipe!

The cupcake was always going to have a whipped cream frosting, and at first we were going to infuse it with rum, in honor of this little nugget of Castiel history: 

Not exactly a happy moment (so few are for poor Castiel), and to be honest, of all the booze we keep in the house? Rum wasn’t something we had in stock, and nobody felt like putting their shoes on to go out and get some.

So we went to Youtube for something that really felt like Cass, and maybe involved food. 

What we found was a really lovely moment: 

So very Castiel. 

But how do you incorporate grape jelly into whipped cream without the whipped cream turning sludgy and much too sweet? 

It was decided that instead of trying to do anything ridiculous, a slather of grape jelly would be spread across the top of the cake, and then the whipped cream piped over that. 

And. 

It.

Is. 

Great.

It’s light and sweet, and even the cakes that were slightly overdone, once in the fridge for a little while (refrigerate your cakes with whipped cream frosting, kids. Don’t let it melt on you!), tasted amazing.

You can find the Angel food cake recipe we used here. We used Welch’s Grape Jelly (NOT JAM), and if you’re unsure on how to make whipped cream, this is how we do: 

INGREDIENTS: 

2 cups of heavy whipping cream

2 tablespoons of granulated sugar

METHOD: 

Dump cream and sugar into the bowl of your stand mixer, and whip the absolute hell out of it until you attain soft peaks and it is light and fluffy! You can also do this with a hand mixer or a whisk, if you’ve got some time on your hands. 

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Since we’re super predictable, we’re gonna be starting off with one of our favorite things: Supernatural! 

Food plays a pretty big role in the Winchester boys’ lives, from shitty cheeseburgers to veggie shakes hiding in the beer cooler to Mary’s Winchester Surprise. To say nothing of Dean’s undeniable love affair with pies of all shapes, flavors and sizes. 

With the show coming to an end once season 15 wraps, we felt it was only fitting to...Wait. Who the hell are we kidding? We woulda started here if the damn thing had been picked up for six more seasons and a movie!

It was great fun to brainstorm what flavors would represent the show and the characters the best. We wound up making four recipes, though with how much we adore this big dumb pretty show, we may circle back around to a pt 2 (We have plans for a Jack cupcake, and thinking up others wouldn’t be super hard).

Without further ado: 

The Demon Blood Cupcake: A devil’s food chocolate cake with a cherry preserve filling and a cayenne butter cream frosting. (devil on the outside, gooey red “blood” on the inside and some spice on top). 

The Sam Winchester Diet Cupcake: A carrot cake with a cinnamon clove cream cheese frosting. (Because you know that no matter how healthy Sam tries to eat, he probably can’t resist eating a cupcake frosting-first). 

The Dean “Me Likey” Winchester Cupcake: A whiskey cake (because Dean) with an apple butter buttercream frosting (Because pie). 

The Castiel Jelly-not-Jam Cupcake: Angel food Cake (duh), with a slather of grape jelly (Not jam. He finds jam...”unsettling.”) and a fluffy light whipped cream on top.

Recipes coming soon!

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Welcome to Bake Nerdy For Me!

So check it out. 

@wonderlandleighleigh and @dettiot have many interests. 

Like so many.

One of those happens to be baking. Mostly cupcakes (though we’ve been known to dabble in cookies, scones, breads and other endeavors), and mostly to share with friends, coworkers and family.

A few years ago, we toyed with creating cupcakes based on our favorite characters from TV, Movies and Comics, but we never did anything with it. We didn’t have the funds to start our own business, and we worried about stepping over a line into copyright infringement as well. 

So our spread sheet full of ideas sat in a shared google doc, waiting for the day when it would again see the light.

And then, one day Leigh said “Hey. We could make the cupcakes, and then post them in a blog! That would be fun!” 

And Melissa said “That DOES sound like fun!” 

So that’s what we’re doing.

We’ll be tackling cupcakes that remind us of Supernatural, various comic book characters, the MCU, Community, Letterkenny and a ton of other things that we love, so stay tuned, nerds. There is definitely something strange afoot at the Circle K.