White Chocoate Cupcakes with Vanilla Frosting, 02/03

There is really only one thing that the phrase "White Chocolate" conjures up in my mind--the guy that had it tattooed on his arm with whom my friend thought it would be funny to set me up. We both got a good laugh out of that and occasionally reference him (but only to make fun of someone as lame as he has to be). But the cupcake recipe did sound good, I hadn't tried it yet, and I had white chocolate chips. The cupcake recipe is from Crazy About Cupcakes, from which I have yet to experience an icky cupcake. They are definitely flavorful with not only white chocolate chips but melted white chocolate in the batter as well. The frosting has a story behind it. I just used Pillsbury Vanilla Frosting, but there was a purpose (and laziness was not it). In the book Hello, Cupcake, they discuss how the store-bought frosting holds color better than homemade, and since I had the idea of coloring it, I stuck with store-bought and will save homemade frosting for next week. So, obviously, I dyed the frosting orange, but then rolled the cupcake in orange sprinkles (pour a whole bunch into a shallow bowl so that you never see the bottom of the bowl, that way the frosting does not stick to the bowl). And to celebrate the near-end of basketball season (high school--one of the Cupcake Wednesday-ers is the coach here), I designed it like a basketball--or as close as I could. The inspiration came from two places--Hello Cupcake for the sprinkles part (they have this AWESOME cupcake platter of "pool balls" for the pool lover that uses color sprinkles for the different colors of the balls) and Martha Stewart's cupcake book for the actual basketball. She, however, used black licorice strings for the design, and for the life of me I could not find them, so I just piped chocolate frosting dyed black instead. Then I thought they looked like spiderwebs on a Halloween cupcake, so I lined a few with white frosting. I'm not sure which looks more authentic but the whole cupcake was a neat concept and I'm glad I learned the whole sprinkle thing because it really does add to the decoration aspect of the cupcake and there are so many directions you can go!