German Chocolate

My boyfriend, being the amazing and attentive man that he is, decided to get me a cupcake book for Valentine’s Day. Martha Stewart’s Cupcakes.

I was ecstatic! It’s filled with glossy page after page of delicious looking cupcakes of every kind and shape, as well as instructions on decorating, frosting, and so forth. Naturally, I had to try a recipe out immediately! The one I chose was a German chocolate cupcakes recipe, complete with the recipe for homemade icing.

German Chocolate cakes and I have never gotten along. A few years back, I got it into my head that I was going to make my mom a birthday cake for her birthday. She chose the flavour, German Chocolate, and I bought the box cake mix and a can of the frosting. I figured it’d be easy as pie. But then I decided to get fancy and make it into a layered cake; this was my first time making a layered cake but it seemed easy enough. You bake two cakes, and stick them together. But, the cakes didn’t come out of the pans in one piece. I did kind of use the coconut frosting as a glue to keep the pieces together, but it was a miserable looking cake.

This time, I figured I had a little more experience under my belt and I was a little more confident. I would make the cupcakes and they would look as yummy as if Martha Stewart had made them herself. I would make Martha proud!

The trouble started when I remembered I had gotten a ‘giant cupcake’ baking pan for Christmas. You know the ones I’m talking about? Where you pour batter into two molds, the bottom of the cupcake and the swirly bit, and then you just bake and stick together. It’d be adorable! The one I got was one of those floppy silicone ones, pretty much like this:

 

I hadn’t used it yet, so I figured why not try it now!

The recipe for the cupcake batter went smoothly (even the butter mixing part), and I poured it into the silicone pan. It jiggled precariously as I slid it into the oven, and the ‘top’ mold kept listing unhappily to one side. I tried wiggling it to get it straight, but every time I checked it in the oven, the batter was cooking hopelessly crooked. Well, this is how it turned out…

 

Uhh… I don’t think that’s right. I decided to let it stay like that to see if it’d flatten a little. My next task was to make the frosting, coconut and pecan. Again, I hit my next trouble.

According to the recipe, you melt the butter, evaporated milk, and sugar in a saucepan over medium heat. It’s supposed to thicken to the ‘consistency of sour cream’ within 10 minutes. …20 minutes later… Soup. That’s all I had. I had brown sugar, butter and milk soup. I double-checked my recipe – all the ingredients were there and correct. After half an hour, I ended up pouring it in with the pecans and coconut flakes. I stirred, and I stirred, and I stirred, but it just became lumpy soup. I ended up putting it in the fridge to thicken it. It worked!

I wasn’t ready to throw in the dish towel just yet. I leveled out the top of the bottom part of the cupcake, and the bottom of the top section. I smeared it with coconut-pecan frosting and voila! Success!

 

It looks pretty tasty, huh?

 

 Still a little bit crooked... oh well!

The recipes for this yummy treat can be found in Martha Stewart's "Cupcakes" book, or her website here: German Chocolate Cupcake and Coconut and Pecan Frosting!

 

Lemon Cupcakes

My mom loves lemon. So when I found a lemon cupcake with lemon cream cheese frosting cupcake recipe in Elinor Klivan’s cupcake recipe book, she was ecstatic. Everytime I got out the mixing bowl, she’d ask, “Are you going to make the lemon cupcakes now? Are you going to make them now?” Finally, I went to make them. Until I realized the recipe called for cake flour. Before now, I never realized there was a difference between regular flour and cake flour. Then again, I never made a cake without just using a premade boxed cake mix before. The good old internet cleared up that difference for me: cake flour is finer than regular flour is. I bought a box of Softasilk cake flour, found down the aisle with all the regular flour bags (obviously) and I was ready to go.

Taking into consideration, my butter problem from my last cupcake baking, I softened my butter for 20 seconds in my microwave, until it was really soft and giving in the middle. I cut it into chunks and dumped it into my mixing bowl. This time, I got that “creamy texture and pale yellow colour” almost immediately. It was beautiful, I was so proud.

My next stumbling block was zesting a lemon. I had never zested a lemon before – I didn’t even know what zesting a lemon was! So off to the internet I went again, and got some handy tips. I didn’t have a zester though, so I used a vegetable peeler in its stead. I was careful not to get the white part of the lemon, and only the yellow rind. I had to chop my zesty pieces up with a knife because they were kind of large, but other than that, it seemed to work well enough. The smell of lemon was beautiful by this point!

The rest of the recipe went smoothly, the cupcake batter smelled heavenly, and was a pretty buttery yellow colour. Nomnomnom!

Into the cupcake cups, the batter went. There was a lot of batter, so I was liberal with pouring it in.

And out came the most beautiful cupcakes I had ever made. They were a lovely yellow colour, and they had risen just enough to create the most perfectly shaped cupcakes I had ever seen. I was so excited. I put them on a wire rack to cool on the kitchen counter, and was planning on frosting them once they had fully cooled. I got a little distracted, so it was much later in the night than I had originally planned when I got around to frosting. That would have been okay…

Except…

My dog, a golden doodle, had decided that the cupcakes smelled good. Really good. Despite the fact that I had pressed them as far back onto the counter as I could, she found out she could reach most of them if she practically climbed onto the counter to get to them. When I came out to frost them, there were only four beautiful yellow cupcakes sitting on the wire rack. My dog had eaten eight lemon cupcakes, cupcake wrappers and all. She looked guilty.

So… no lemon cupcakes.

And my dog didn’t have any lasting repercussions from consuming eight lemon cupcakes. She didn’t even throw them back up, so I guess that is a sign of my better cupcake baking. My mom ate two more of them, unfrosted, and agreed with the dog, “They were delicious and very moist.”

I did manage to rescue one and ice it before my household realized it was still in the house. So I frosted it (white chocolate buttercream), and took a picture. And then I ate it. YUM!

My First Attempt

I got this Cupcake Kit for Christmas. Complete with a lovely little recipe book and everything a cupcake-beginner needs, this became a deciding factor on my attempt to bake cupcakes officially. The “pictures looked tasty” is a deciding factor for me, apparently.

So far, I’ve only ventured through the book to use the simple recipes offered, before I decide to branch off on my own and start making grand pièce de résistance of my own. I started out fairly easy anyways, the first recipe I prepped for was a chocolate cupcake and a white chocolate cream cheese frosting. Yum, right? 

I tried this recipe the beginning of last week. I dithered for most of the week on whether I wanted to start this blog or not, (or I forgot, or I wasn’t inspired, or insert-random-excuse here), either way, it took a little while until I took the plunge. 

The recipe was insanely easy to follow. I was a little worried that to be a good cupcake baker, I’d have to stand on one foot and juggle eggs or some ridiculous cooking maneuver that I never really understand why anyone does, but it works! And they have delicious fluffy cupcakes that could be on a cupcake runway. I digress. The recipe was easy to follow, and the ingredients seemed easy enough to put together.

The hardest part I had was mixing the butter and sugar together, oddly enough. The first step; it figures! I had left my sticks of butter out all day for them to become “room temperature.” I guess room temperature according to the recipe is a lot warmer than room temperature in my kitchen. Mind you, it’s winter here, and my house isn’t exactly a tropical paradise. My kitchen also is an extension off of the house, so the heat that rises from the basement misses the kitchen. 

Anyways, the butter just kind of clumped forlornly in my mixing bowl, and clogged up my mixer in the most aggravating way; I spent a lot of the mixing process pausing to poke the butter out with a spatula before I just smooshed the whole sugar and butter mess together in hopes that it looked ‘creamy and a pale yellow colour.’ (It wasn’t really.) 

The rest of the process went by smoothly, other than my innate ability to get any powdery cooking ingredient absolutely everywhere. I added some chocolate chips I had leftover from my fudge making spree for extra goodness!

Into the oven they went! 12 little cupcake cups filled with chocolatey yum.

 Well. I didn’t burn them. That’s always a plus! 

 But the consistency of the cupcakes left much to be desired; they were kind of rubbery. The taste didn’t really make up for it either, they weren’t very chocolatey: very bland. I wasn’t sure if it was the recipe itself, or the baker at fault. My baking cocoa is in one of those obscure Hershey cocoa containers, you know the kind that I mean? The expiration date says 2015 but you’re pretty sure it’s been stuffed in the back of the cupboard since the random chocolate brownie baking stint you went on 2 years ago. Oops. Not to mention, my aggravation with the butter and sugar mixing earlier. Was I supposed to mix it more? Next time, I’m going to try and make the butter at a more ideal temperature before I start to mix it!

 I decided to smother the whole unsatisfying batch with white chocolate cream cheese icing. The recipe again, came from the cupcake book. With my butter incident in mind, I softened my cream cheese in the microwave instead of hoping it would soften on its own in my chilly kitchen. It went well enough, even when I had to use the double boiler to melt the white chocolate. I squeezed the icing onto the cupcakes lavishly. The amount of icing was a perfect ratio to the number of cupcakes I had, which was pleasing. The cream cheese frosting was a little overwhelming in the cream cheese tasting department, and it still didn’t quite hide the weird rubbery texture the cupcake had, but it was good nonetheless! 

But still, altogether not bad for my first attempt at proper cupcake baking.

I’ve always loved cupcakes. There was just something always so fascinating.They just seemed perfectly reasonable in so many ways: just the right size, and I never had to share, the flavours, the colours. As a kid, cake was high priority on any kid’s list; better than cookies, better than pie! And for me, it was like the forbidden treasure of sweets, the one you only got on special occasions, birthdays mostly, but sometimes the ‘good kid’ treat, or a rare wedding cake. But it seems my obsession, and the world’s obsession with cupcakes has grown over the past year. It’s a perfectly reasonable obsession – I mean, just LOOK at a cupcake. What’s not to love about one?  

I don’t think I need to point out it’s good points – I could make a chart, but it’d mostly be Pros: everything. Cons: nothing.

It was boredom more than anything that got me more into the kitchen. I had graduated from college, and the flighty person that I am, I had no job prospects lined up. I suddenly had free time on my hands, more than I knew what to do with. At first, it was enjoyable – my sewing machine and I had a lot of hours together. I then gravitated into the kitchen, where meals that involved simply being taken out of the box and put into the oven became more tedious and less interesting (and more cardboard-tasting in flavour). I became fascinated with the thoughts of how to put the meal together myself, that didn’t involve pre-packaged ready-made dinners. I attempted a cooking phase when I was younger – I could make chocolate chip cookies from scratch, and if I was feeling adventurous, I could make a homemade veggie pizza. Those were my limits. Most of my cooking was dabbling with boxed cake mixes and bags of cookie mix. When Julie and Julia hit the theatres, I knew my fascination wasn’t new. But when I realized that the movie was really a book first, and that book was really a blog – a cooking blog – I started to read the blog. And then I was reading more blogs. By that point, there was no turning back. I was a goner. I wanted to cook. I wanted to bake, and broil, and fry. Mostly I wanted to bake. Mostly cupcakes.

 

But: I also know my skills in the kitchen (they’re not the greatest), and the thought of following in Julie Powell’s footsteps and kicking it with Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” cookbook was terrifying. Julie Powell might not have persuaded me to the dark side – that is French cooking – but she did show me a whole new side of the internet: cooking blogs. And, there are dozens! No matter where I looked, I’d find a recipe, and that recipe would lead me to a suggestion of another blog, and on and on it went. It was never ending. I guess I might be adding to the pile of cooking blogs – specifically cupcake blogs. The problem is keeping up with a blog. I generally create one and then lose interest in it in a couple weeks. Or I forget entirely I had a blog. I told myself, I wouldn’t forget because every time I baked a batch of cupcakes or I cooked something, it would remind me “Oh hey, you should blog this!” 

Generally speaking, I feel as though I get a little muse when I'm cooking. I'm not sure if it's because my mind frees up or because it's whirling with all my ingredients I'm trying to remember ("Okay, 1 cup flour, 3 eggs, 2 sticks butter... How much vanilla?") that my muse just finds a way to sneak in little phrases into my mind. It delights me, to a degree. I have always dabbled in writing, and I have been muse-less for a while. I wasn't sure if it was the lack of inspiration, or the forced paper-writing I did for my college degree. Regardless, whenever I sat down to write, nothing really came out of it. Writing about cupcakes at least gave me a focus.

For all I’ll know, I’ll get three recipes in, and decide, “I don’t want to bake cupcakes anymore,” and that will be that.

Here’s to a new project: an attempt at blogging and an attempt at baking (which is far yummier than blogging, that’s for sure!). And here’s to you, you poor suckers, who might have read this!

Note: I originally started this over at tumblr, but I didn't like the layout. Some of the options were nice, like being able to have a nice lovely cooking quote from Julia Child on there, or posting my favourite cupcake sites. But regardless, I just didn't feel like I meshed well with tumblr. It was a little tricky. So here I am, blogspot!