Friday, June 27, 2008

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!

8 comments:

Anne said...

I'm so impressed. :) You truly did an excellent job, and it's incredibly inspiring! :)

Anonymous said...

Your Aussie is beautiful! I have a blue merle Aussie- with 1 prick ear and one folded ear as well! I love her so much, and she loves being in the kitchen with me while I bake!

Love your ham and egg danish bread!

Amelia said...

Thanks Anne! I really didn't plan on making THAT many :D.

Teanna - I love my aussie, he's wicked smart, too smart for his own good sometimes! He turned 7 this year but you'd think he was still a puppy by the way he acts!

Anonymous said...

OMG! What more can you say?? That is a whole lotta cupcakes! But they look really yummy. I've been meaning to try the Magnolia Bakery recipe. And I'm making cupcakes for this weekend, so maybe now's the time. Question: did you add the ganache to the cupcake recipe or the icing recipe? I was a little confused. Oh! Congrats on the danish for DB. It looks great!

Amelia said...

anjanette - I added the ganache to Zoe's cream cheese icing recipe. I made what amounted to a cup of ganache, but added only half of it (taste testing until it was the chocolate level I was looking for).

Good luck - the red velvet recipe was a hit with folks here. Hubby was skeptical, but ended up saying he like them better than the Devil's Food :).

Anonymous said...

Have you ever used carob in place of chocolate?
I know many people avoid carob, but I find that the trick is to find the right brand and

then you'll really see that carob can be (almost) as good as chocolate.

The brand I use is from Holy Food Imports,
which comes from Israel, so it does have an excellent and unique taste.

Amelia said...

Clara, I haven't used carob personally, but have tried it in homebaked goods from friends. The taste is not bad. I like experimenting with flavors, especially alternative ingredients, considering all the food-related allergies out there today. I'll definitely give carob a try in the future! Thanks for the link.

Zoe Francois said...

Hey, your cupcakes look amazing! I love the ganache addition and can't wait to try it. Thanks!