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!