CupCake Foolery - That's all you can call it!

This post is long, but the end makes it all worth while! As I mentioned in an earlier post, I planned to make cupcakes at the end of this week. My intention was to only do Devil’s Food, but the compulsive baker in me somehow decided that I needed to offer variety… Cupcakes are never a BAD idea, but by the time I was putting the 4th DOZEN out of the oven, I started thinking that maybe, JUST MAYBE, I had gone overboard….

I love chocolate cake; I am not talking Chocolate Death type cakes either, though they are good. I am talking about a good old fashioned chocolate cake that even by itself, unadulterated tastes amazing. I have tried many recipes for German Chocolate, Chocolate, Devil’s Food, and never found a recipe I liked – I preferred to use boxed cake mix because it produced just as good results as all those scratch recipes I tried, with a lot less hassle.

I stumbled upon Zoë, from “Artisan Baking in 5 Minutes” fame and her site this past January. Her site is amazing, the pictures are gorgeous and the recipes she posts about blow me away. When I saw her Devil’s Food cupcakes and knew I had to try that recipe some day. Well a few weeks ago, I needed to provide dessert for a dinner I was going to and chocolate cupcakes seemed like the perfect thing. I gave this recipe a try and I was HOOOKED – Thank you Zoë!!! I followed her recipe exactly as she provided it, so I am not going to reproduce it here but you can find it on her site (link above), along with many other tempting ideas! I measured out and mixed the dry and wet ingredients:

As she indicates, the batter is ‘thinner’ than you’d expect:


I used a ¼ measuring cup to fill the lined cupcake pans. I didn’t take any pictures, because who doesn’t know what that looks like!

Her recipe makes three dozen cupcakes – I allowed them to cool then topped them with the icing recipe she provided. I did make one change – I added about ½ cup of chocolate ganache to her recipe. While waiting for the chocolate cupcakes to bake (I only trust my oven to one pan at a time) is when I came up with the fabulous idea of making a different ‘flavor’ of cupcake. At the time I didn’t factor exactly HOW MANY cupcakes I was going to bring into this world. My husband claims my simple math skills are non-existent, and laughed at me as the number of cupcakes increased at an exponential rate.

I decided my second flavor would be red velvet. I was looking at some of the past Daring Bakers challenges a few days ago and came across this from Ivonne at Cream Puffs in Venice. WHO WOULDN’T WANT TO MAKE THOSE???? HELLLOOO???? So while dozen #2 and #3 of the Devil’s Food were baking, I googled the recipe she used (Magnolia Bakery’s) and started down the path to cupcake oblivion…

The batter is completely different than the Devil’s food – it’s based on butter instead of oil, making the batter more stable and thick, which also results in a more sponge like cupcake. I didn’t take any pictures – whipping up a recipe I never made before, on top of trying to remember that I have to not burn my other cupcakes was enough for my brain to handle at 7pm.

I made it though! After the last of the red velvet cupcake batter was in the oven, I went into high gear making Zoë’s icing as well as the Magnolia Bakery Vanilla Cream icing I found. The dog was apparently aware of the cupcake foolery that was in progress, and tried to persuade me to convince one of the cupcakes to commit suicide, but I steeled myself against the Power of Cute:


By 11pm, the cupcakes, ALL 72 OF THEM, were happily resting in the fridge (please disregard the mess – I had to shove things around to fit all the cupcakes):



This morning, to the extreme I brought them into work, to the appreciation of my fellow co-workers!





Cupcakes for breakfast? It's the new breakfast of champions!