Hello, Cupcake!

I got a new book today, Hello, Cupcake!, and I'm really excited about it, (and only partially because I love anything with an exclimation point in the title). It's all about decorating cupcakes and turning them into something. So nothing at all like what I've been doing. (Unless you count last years frankencakes)

The basic idea is that you use cupcakes, and other foods like marshmellows, candies, doughnuts, etc to form figures. The book shows everything from puppies to bowling pins and gives pretty decent step by step instructions how to do it. There's even one thats got 24 cakes all lined up to form the famous image Starry Night

Simple

Yesterday, when I was sick of watching TV, but didn't feel up to tackling the out of control mess that is my bedroom, I decided to bake. But when I looked in my cupboards I realized that the combination of baking up a storm this last month, and not having a car to make regular trips to the grocery store had left my baking ingredients pretty depleted. I had butter, sugar, 2 eggs, some milk, but not much else. I was out of vanilla, and most recipes call for more eggs, or other things like buttermilk, powdered sugar, in short, things I didn't have. Justin had also said that if I was going to be doing this much baking, then he would have to assign me a monthly budget and he hadn't done that yet. So I decided to turn to the most simple recipe I knew, Yellow Cake with Chocolate frosting.

Yellow Cake

• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 3/4 cup white sugar
• 1/4 cup shortening
• 1/2 cup milk
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 2 whole eggs

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Prepare cupcake pan with paper liners. Sift together the flour, baking powder and salt; set aside.
2. In a large bowl, cream sugar and shortening until light and fluffy. Add eggs one at a time, beating thoroughly after each addition. Add flour mixture alternately with milk, beating just to combine. Finally, stir in vanilla. Pour batter into the prepared pan.
3. Bake at 350 degrees F for 17 to 24 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into a cake comes out clean.

Chocolate Ganache

• 8 ounces Heavy Cream/Whipping Cream
• 8 ounces of semi-sweet chocolate (chips, or chopped)
• 2 tablespoons butter

Heat heavy cream in the microwave for up to 4 minutes. Cream should simmer but don't let it boil over. Pour the hot cream over the chocolate and whisk together until creamy. If the chocolate isn't incorporating fully reheat mixture for up to 30 seconds at a time stirring in between microwaving until chocolate, butter and cream have fully combined. Cover mixture in saran (to avoid a crusty layer forming press saran down so that it lays directly on the ganache).

After two hours the ganache should have the consistency of a heavy frosting. Alternatively, dip the cupcakes in the mixture at room temperature and refrigerate cakes to set up the ganache. This will create a thin, but very smooth frosting that can either be a crumb coating for chilled ganache or for those who prefer less frosting eaten as is.

Yellow cake and chocolate frosting is one of my favorite cake/frosting combination, and this super easy ganache is rich in flavor and heavy in texture which is so nice with the light fluffy yellow cake. The yellow cake recipe is easy as it gets for a cake-from-scratch recipe as long as you stick to the directions. The order in which the ingredients are added is important and it's when people deviate from the instructions that cakes come out hard, flat, or otherwise go awry. When you cream butter and sugar you're using the sugar to cut tiny holes into the butter, which allow for a light, bubbly texture. Sifting together the dry ingredients both ensures an even distribution of baking powder and salt and this introduces oxygen and lightness into the batter early on. Alternating between the flower and milk prevents the cake from getting too wet, or too heavy. Recipes from scratch are often much thicker in texture than boxed mixes, if this is the case with yours be encouraged.

This recipe is small, I think it reasonably makes 18 cupcakes if you strictly adhere to the "fill liners 3/4 of the way full" rule but I never do. I got 16. Even for a batch that says it will yield 24 cupcakes i usually end up with about 20.

Simple is often best, and this case, simple was delicious. The ganache which is unfortunately underutilized in cupcakes (until I joined the baking world) adds a touch of class to the easy yellow cake.

Sometimes I Fail

So I'm sitting here eating a can of bartlett pear halves because sometimes I fail. Today I thought I'd try my hand at making my own hostess type cupcakes. I wanted to take all the things that are wonderful about a hostess cream filled cupcake and amplify it by 84,000x. I wanted to find a really good devils food cake recipe, and make my own fluffy cream filling then top if off with a chocolate ganache. I would have even done a little white swirl on top. But I learned what happens when I get lazy with my baking. My kitchen wasn't clean, I didn't have all the ingredients I needed and I just didn't have the necessary oomph to fix those things. I went up to the Denny Market to try to get the things I needed but the Patron Saint of Baked Goods just wasn't looking after me today. Ok, I guess I should talk about the cake recipe I had found. Again, another example of laziness that did NOT pay off in the end. Just reading the ingredients should have turned me running in the other direction. Or at the very least I should have just taken a nap instead. Here they are:

Ingredients:

1 box devil’s food cake mix
1 small box Jello instant chocolate pudding mix (not the sugar or fat free kind!)
1 cup sour cream
1 cup vegetable oil
4 eggs, beaten
1/2 cup milk
1 tsp pure vanilla extract
2 cups mini semisweet chocolate chips

I know, I know... A box cake mix. But it had other things, and I thought it might work. And to be fair it may have (doubt it) worked but Denny Market is small, (more convenience store less grocery). They had milk chocolate cake mix, not devils food. They didn't have pudding, and I wasn't going to spend $5 on a bag of chocolate chips. I also needed powdered sugar for my cream filling and they didn't have that either. To top it off when I got home I found out I didn't have any more vanilla either.

To sum up the cake mix was awful, and the cream filling ended up being grainy (I tried to make my own powdered sugar by blending regular sugar but it was still grainy) I didn't even bother to make a frosting. I gave one to Justin and he said they tasted exactly like the hostess ones and I had to explain to him that my home made cupcakes should have tasted WAY better than their preservative filled, generic, corporate greed cakes. I need to educate this boy's palette. I will try these again, because I think I can do them great justice. I'll just make sure I have a clean space to bake in, all the right ingredients, and well researched recipes to work with.

Also? Dinner sucked. I ran out of olive oil and so I used a parmesan garlic salad dressing on my red potatoes and asparagus that I was roasting. I over roasted them, and for some reason (I blame the sauce) the BBQ chicken I did was pretty awful. So it's me and my can of pears now. At least they're delicious.

In my opinion this all just goes to show that baking and cooking need love just as much as they need sugar or olive oil. Lesson learned.

Little Bit(e)s of Love, An explination

"Little Bit(e)s of Love"

My parent's affectionate name for me has always been Little Bit. So it felt appropriate to include that name in this little blog and baking project I'm undertaking. Anytime that I've cooked or baked for my family and friends I've always felt that I was feeding them little bits of my love. It's no secret to anyone who knows me that what I so desperately want in life is to be a mother and until that time comes, I mother my friends by feeding them my love in cupcake form.

Meyer Lemon Raspberry Cupcakes

Ingredients

Makes 2 dozen

• 1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter
• 2 cups sugar
• 2 teaspoons vanilla bean paste or 1 vanilla bean, scraped
• 5 large eggs, separated
• 1 3/4 cups plus 2 tablespoons plus 1 teaspoon all-purpose flour
• 1 cup plus scant 1/3 cup cake flour (not self-rising)
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup sour cream
• Meyer Lemon Curd
• Vanilla Bean Buttercream
• Sanding sugar
• 24 raspberries

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line 2 standard muffin tins with cupcake liners; set aside.
2. In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, beat butter and sugar together until light and fluffy. Add vanilla; beat to combine. Add egg yolks, one at a time, beating well after each addition.
3. Sift together both flours, baking powder, and salt into a large bowl. With the mixer on low, add flour mixture; mix until well combined. Add sour cream; mix until well combined.
4. In a clean bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the whisk attachment, beat egg whites until stiff peaks form. Gently fold egg whites into batter.
5. Fill each muffin cup half full with batter. Transfer muffin tins to oven and bake until a skewer inserted into the center of one of the cupcakes comes out clean, 20 to 24 minutes. Let cupcakes cool completely.
6. Using an apple corer, make a hole in the top of each cupcake, taking care not to push the corer through the bottom; remove cake from hole. Fill a squirt bottle with lemon curd and squeeze curd into holes.
7. Fit a pastry bag with a 3/8-inch plain round tip and fill with buttercream. Pipe buttercream in a circular motion on top of each cupcake; sprinkle with sanding sugar. Pipe a dollop of buttercream in the center of each cupcake and top with a raspberry.

I spent a really wonderful Thursday with my mom. She had come on Wednesday night to meet, (and drink tequila!!) with my Seattle friends. In the morning we took a sweaty walk through the Sculpture Park and Myrtle Edwards with Gracie Lou. Then we went to Pike Place where we had delicious peaches, bought some Beecher's cheese, honey sticks, paintings, and chicken club sandwiches.

We spent the rest of the night in the kitchen, we made an AMAZING macaroni and cheese with penne pasta, garlic, and a mix of the Beecher's and a cheddar cheese. The majority of the night though was spent on trying out the recipe from Vanilla, a cupcakery in Santa Monica, CA that was shown on Martha Stewart during Cupcake Week.

The really incredible part of these cupcakes is in the surprise lemon curd filling. I LOVE a cupcake with a surprise inside. This one was especially wonderful because of how bright and fresh tasting it was! I loved watching peoples reactions as they ate the cupcakes, especially since it really wasn't until the second bite that you got to the filling. The base for these was a simple vanilla cake and I have never seen a more gorgeous batter. It heavy and thick and it glistened. The result was perfectly white fluffy cake that was a perfectly bubbly texture. This was also my first time making a butter cream. Wow! So MUCH butter. I'll have to look at other recipes to see if this was normal because no matter how much powdered sugar I added I could still taste butter. I think I would have preferred something a little lighter, fluffier.

The end result was just incredible! I don't know if I'll ever be able to use a cake mix again. Betty Crocker doesn't have anything on me now!

Better Than Betty

For the past two days all I've been thinking about is baking. Cupcakes, gumpaste flowers, petite fours, wedding cakes, fondant, and piping tips. Actually it all started with piping tips. My husband and I were at the Metropolitan Market picking up groceries for dinner. On our way to check out we took the baking aisle and I stopped dead in my tracks when I saw a whole display with piping tips. (There were probably other cake decorating supplies too but I only had eyes for those tips). My mom had been cleaning out the pantry and had given me a bunch of piping bags but I didn't have any tips, and here was my chance. I picked out a small star tip. I also grabbed a box of Betty Crocker Devil's Food and a fluffy white frosting. I was making cupcakes.

I made deliciously moist psychedelic colored cupcakes. But they were boring. I used my star tip and played with different patterns on the cupcakes but the whole time I knew that that little metal piping tip could do so much more than I was capable of. That's when I decided that I want to be a better baker than the average Jane (Betty?). So I searched online for baking/decorating classes in Seattle and I was actually kind of dismayed by what I found. There were very mixed results, Micheal's crafts store does a Wilton's method decorating class, but doesn't teach anything about baking. A few bakeries offered fondant classes, wedding cake classes, or other specific techniques but I wanted something more all inclusive. There is one that I'd like to take, its offered by a bakery down the street from my house and it looks like I could probably learn a lot from it. But its $400. Justin laughed when I told him the price. I don't think cake is worth that much to him. So I guess its up to me to teach myself.