Archive for the ‘cupcakes’ Category

Time for a list.

“Things I am sort of obsessed with these days”

• Anything written by Brandon Sanderson
• This licorice! Good grief people!
  
• Clean bathtubs
• Squishy pink baby pudge. Nom nom nom…
• Jeeves and Wooster. On Amazon for only $20? Temptation!
• Blessed peace and quiet

And let’s be honest. “Dipping things in chocolate” is right up there too.

First that, now this.

My husband’s coworkers came out and asked for cupcakes. Chocolate was the unanimous flavor request, with one mention of strawberry. Aha! Chocolate-dipped strawberries. Everybody wins.

I frosted these with stabilized whipped cream, which is definitely lighter than frosting. That makes me happy. I’m not a huge fan of most frosting, but maybe I just haven’t met my true love yet.

Chocolate Strawberries ‘n Cream Cupcakes

adapted from Bakers Banter

Ingredients for cupcakes:

2 cups sugar

2 cups all-purpose flour

2 tablespoons Instant ClearJel or cornstarch

3/4 cup Dutch-process cocoa

2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon salt

4 large eggs

3/4 cup vegetable oil

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

1-1/4 cup water, room temperature

For stabilized whipped cream:

1-1/2 cup heavy whipping cream

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1/2 cup powdered sugar

1/4 teaspoon Instant ClearJel

For chocolate-dipped strawberries:

1 dozen strawberries

1-1/2 cup high-quality semi-sweet chocolate chips (I love Guittard)

Directions:

Make the chocolate-dipped strawberries first. Melt the chocolate chips on low heat in a double-boiler, fondue pot, or mini crock pot on low. Make sure the strawberries are clean and completely dry.

Line a baking sheet with wax paper. Hold a strawberry by the leaves and dip it 3/4 of the way into the chocolate. Shake gently to remove the excess chocolate, and place on wax paper. Chill the dipped strawberries in the fridge while you make the cupcakes and whipped cream. (When you’re ready to use the dipped strawberries, make sure the chocolate is completely set, and peel them very carefully from the wax paper.)

Next make the cupcakes. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Prepare two 8″ rounds with grease and parchment paper. (If your 8″ rounds aren’t 2″ high, you’ll want to use 9″ rounds instead.)

In a large mixing bowl, whisk together all the dry ingredients. Add the eggs, oil, and vanilla, beating until smooth. Gradually add the milk, beating until smooth.

Spoon the batter evenly into a paper-lined cupcake pan. Bake for 20-25 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the middle of a cupcake comes out clean.

While the cupcakes are baking, make the whipped cream frosting.

To make the frosting, add the heavy whipping cream to a medium-sized mixing bowl, and beat on medium-low speed, gradually adding the powdered sugar. Increase the mixing speed slightly as the cream thickens. Whip the cream just until stiff peaks form, then add the vanilla and Instant ClearJel. Whip until incorporated, no more than 15-20 seconds. If the whipped cream appears lumpy, add a teaspoon of milk and stir gently until smooth.

Once the cupcakes are completely cool, pipe the whipped cream frosting onto the cupcakes with a large round tip. Garnish with chocolate sprinkles or shavings, and let them chill in the fridge for 10 minutes. Top with a chocolate dipped strawberry. Keep them cool in the refrigerator until ready to serve.

It’s confession time.

I’ve been baking like a mad woman for the past couple of weeks. Yeah. Do mad women bake?

That didn’t sound like a confession. Let me try that again:

I’ve been baking like a madwoman for the past couple of weeks, and my camera spent most of that time in another room of the house, NOT documenting any of the kitchen action.

No photos, no blog post. I’m ashamed, really.

See, the hardest part of food blogging for me is snapping a well-composed, well-lit photo so I can put it in a blog post. It seems like I’m always either in a big hurry with not a second to spare for photography, or I’m baking something for an event where it’s just not convenient or even possible to get a good photo. Yeah, I’m actually just making lame excuses here.

Exactly one second before these photos were taken, I was feverishly tossing sprinkles onto these cupcakes like my life depended on it. And exactly one second after the photos were taken, I was dashing out the door with them.

I love my blog readers. Know how I know? Because I was willing to run a little late in order to document these cupcakes, because they are just that good, and I wasn’t about to let you miss out. See? I’m here for you. I’m on your side.

These chocolate cupcakes are not light and fluffy. They’re dark and dense and down-to-business. These are grumpy-pants Mr. Darcy cupcakes. I really hope you don’t think I’m a weirdo because I just said that.

The light and creamy peanut butter frosting is a perfect complement. A friend of mine told me she could bathe in this frosting. Enough said.

Chocolate Fudge Cupcakes

Ingredients:

1-3/4 cup all-purpose flour

1-1/3 cup sugar

3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon baking soda

2 eggs

3/4 cup canola oil

1/2 cup sour cream

1/4 cup milk

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. In a mixing bowl, sift together the flour, sugar, cocoa, salt, and baking soda. In a medium-sized bowl, whisk together the remaining ingredients. Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and mix just until incorporated and smooth, about one minute.

Scoop evenly into lined muffin cups (fill each cup about 1/2 full) and bake for 18-20 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean. Allow to cool in the pan for about 5 minutes, then remove the cupcakes to a wire rack to cool completely.

Creamy Peanut Butter Frosting

Ingredients:

1 cup butter, room temperature

1 cup creamy peanut butter

4 cups powdered sugar

1/4 cup milk

2 teaspoons vanilla

Directions:

In a large bowl, cream butter and peanut butter together until smooth. Stir in the powdered sugar a cup at a time, and beat until well-blended. Add the milk and vanilla and mix until smooth and fluffy.

Remember November?

Neither do I. It’s all kind of a giant blur of roast turkey, wedding cake, and contractions.

And pomegranate juice. The lovely people over at POM Wonderful contacted me and sent a case of pomegranate juice accompanied by more facts and figures than I have fingers and toes to count. Bottom line: This stuff is insanely good for you. To say the least. (Mosey on over to their site, and I’ll let them handle all the physiological nitty-gritty.)

So, I gathered a handful of recipes, placed my juice in the fridge, and told my husband not to drink it, because, hey, I had big plans. But that night, we decided to open just one of the little bottles of juice. Just one. Just to try it out. Surely I wouldn’t need all 12 bottles for baking, right?

And that’s how it started. Every couple of days we would buckle, and another little bottle would disappear from the fridge, and I would shave down my list of pomegranate recipes. At last we were left with one bottle. One little bottle of pomegranate juice, sitting all by his lonesome.

My husband asked me several times if he could just go ahead and drink it. No. Are you sure? Yes. Please? No. Part of it? No.

That was two months ago. Two months that little bottle has been sitting in the fridge. Two months my husband has been pestering me to let him finish it off. Two months I have said no, and secretly wondered when I would get around to it.

Valentines Day. That’s when I would get around to it. Here we are, two months later.

So, Happy Valentines Day! I brought you pink cupcakes. Last Valentines Day I brought you pink cupcakes too, but they weren’t as cute, and the photography was embarrassing. And I didn’t bother including any recipes. This time around I’m doing it up right.

Golden Vanilla Cupcakes

2 cups sugar

3-1/4 cups flour

2-1/2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 cup butter, room temperature

1-1/4 cup milk, room temperature

1 Tablespoon vanilla extract

4 large eggs

1/4 cup vegetable oil

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Line muffin tin with papers.

In a large mixing bowl, whisk together the sugar, flour, baking powder, and salt. Add the butter and beat until mixture looks sandy. Combine the milk and vanilla and add to the flour mixture all at once. Add the vegetable oil, and mix at low speed just until incorporated. Scrape the sides of the bowl. Add the eggs one at a time, beating between each egg. Scrape the sides of the bowl again and beat the mixture on low for 30 seconds.

Transfer the batter to the cupcake papers, filling about 2/3 full. Bake for 20-25 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the center of a cupcake comes out clean. Remove the muffin tin from the oven and place the cupcakes on a rack to cool. Make sure cupcakes are cooled completely before frosting them.

POM Cream Cheese Frosting

adapted from www.pomwonderful.com

1-1/2 cups Pomegranate juice

4 oz. butter, room temperature

8 oz. cream cheese, room temperature

14 oz. powdered sugar

Directions:

In a small saucepan, reduce the pomegranate juice, over low heat, down to 3 fl. oz. Allow to cool.

Place butter and cream cheese in a large mixing bowl and cream together until soft and fluffy. Turn the speed down to low and slowly add the powdered sugar and pomegranate juice reduction. Mix until the sugar is fully incorporated.

Place icing into a piping bag with a round or star tip, and decorate cupcakes.

***This is me just being a little nit-picky. You can probably tell the formatting is wonky in this post. That’s because I imported it from Blogger, and the Blogger Fairies did something weird to the fonts that I haven’t been able to fix. Okay, I’m done.***

This is the third time today I’ve tried to sit down and write this post. I don’t know, friends. The muse just isn’t with me. Just consider all subsequent words optional, okay?

Lemon Poppy Seed Muffins