Commencement & Cupcake Buffet....

Yesterday Brian, Nicole and I graduated from Youngstown State University. It was such a wonderful feeling to walk across the stage even though I do not remember much of it. Commencement actually seemed like it took 20 years, but walking across the stage and receiving my diploma seemed like it was 2.3 seconds long.

After both (Grad & Undergrad) commencement ceremonies we had a party at our house. So many wonderful people came to our house and help us celebrate, Brian estimated about 60. My family came in from out of town to help us celebrate too. We had such a wonderful time, I had the idea of having a cupcake buffet at the party so I had to get to work early on it. I started on Thursday by baking all of the cupcakes. The cake flavors I made were lemon, chocolate, butter, peanut butter, coconut and carrot/pineapple. The day before our party my mom helped me make caramel, German chocolate cake filling, and eight different types of frostings ALL FROM SCRATCH!

We had such a good time at the party here are some pictures of commencement and our cupcake buffet:

Here is a photo of me full of smiles right after I received my diploma.


Here is a picture of Brian, my mom and I after Brian received his degree.


And here are some pictures of the fabulous cupcake buffet that my mom and I made. The flavors that we made were:

Pineapple Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting drizzled with homemade caramel
Peanut butter and Jelly cupcakes with peanut butter buttercream and strawberry jelly
Coconut cupcakes with cream cheese frosting
Lemon cupcakes with raspberry buttercream and a dollop of raspberry jam
Chocolate with Chocolate buttercream and caramel filling
Bailey's Irish Cream buttercream with butter cake and butterscotch filling
Butter cupcakes with Vanilla buttercream sunflowers
German Chocolate cupcakes

We made so many cupcakes on our buffet we were only able to put out about half of them.



I baked a total of 233 cupcakes.
Here are the Bailey's ones and the Chocolate caramel ones.


Here are the coconut cupcakes.


Peanut butter and Jelly.



Pineapple Carrot cake wtih Cream cheese frosting.


Vanilla buttercream sunflowers.


Chocolate caramel.


It was so great having my mom help. I just had to make the buttercream show her how to decorate one sample cupcake and then she would complete the rest as I started to make the next flavor of buttercream. All of the cupcakes came out wonderful even though Lucy pulled a fast one on us and ate one raspberry lemon cupcake.

It was such a great day and it was wonderful to be surrounded by friends and family.