Ace of Cupcakes

Last Friday, Mike and I wanted to sit down to a quiet romantic dinner. I even volunteered to cook! I tried to my own variation on a meal that we love to have at our favorite restaurant - the Staetler Chicken at Bootlegger's in Lunenburg. I have to admit - my execution of the maple-glazed chicken and the maple cream sauce with sage and walnuts was beyond perfection. The butternut squash raviolis I made left much to be desired. I used a fancy shortcut known as "wonton wrappers" to imitate the pasta aspect of the ravioli. My recommendation for the future - don't do this. Use your effort to look for pre-made, pre-packaged butternut squash ravs, or do it the real way. Wonton wrappers were no fun. The ravioli filling was good, but once boiled, the wrappers just became a pile of wet mush. The ones I made that skipped the boiling stage - the ones I simply pan-seared in the cream sauce - maintained a pasta-like texture and tasted good, but the boiled ones were a travesty at best.

My next attempt was a failure, too! I tried to make a shortcut version of tiramisu. I got store-bought ladyfingers, soaked them in instant espresso, and made a ricotta (leftover from the raviolis) and whipped cream mixture to replace the traditional marscapone. This, much like my ravs, left much to be desired. I was in a cooking slump, and needed something to help return me to my baketress status! Just for honesty-sake - neither of these pictures above, not the ravs or the tiramisu - were my own work. They were found on Google images - the only place I could come across good quality tiramisu or ravs - seeing that I couldn't get the job done myself!

Sunday it was time to bring out all the stops. I was going to bake something and I was going to be successful. What is the easiest thing to bake and NOT screw up? Yup, cupcakes! Now, I am the proud owner of two books on cupcakes, as well as the Martha Stewart baking handbook. There are literally hundreds (as you read in my last blog, at least 500!) variations on traditional cupcakes. So narrowing it down to what I wanted to try on Sunday was hard. However, being true to my sweet tooth I followed my instincts - I wanted something maple-y and walnut-y. I am guessing I was on some kind of maple-walnut kick last weekend - not sure where that came from! But alas, I found a great caramel-penuche frosting recipe online. Here it goes:

• 1/2 cup (1 stick) butter, or margarine for dairy-free frosting
  
• 1 cup brown sugar
  
• 1/4 - 1/2 cup milk, or warm water for dairy-free frosting
  
• 1 teaspoon pure vanilla
  
• 4 cups confectioners' or icing sugar

I modified it a smidgen - using fat-free half n'half instead of the water or milk option. I also cut the recipe in half, thinking that I didn't want to have too many cupcakes lying around the house - especially since Biscuit and I were anticipating a snow day on Monday. I also added just a touch of maple syrup to the frosting in addition to the vanilla to kick up the flavor.

I made these delicious moist walnut cupcakes. Interestingly enough, they used very little flour. In place of the mass quantities of flour that usually go into cake or cupcake recipes, the recipe called for ground walnuts. Now, working with ground walnuts is quite interesting. If you put them in the food processor and go at them for too long, they will turn into an oily mess, and then into walnut butter. This is NOT what you want to happen. You want to pulse them long enough until the a fine and still dry. You want to keep all that walnut oil goodness in the ground nuts so it will keep the cupcake itself moist and delicious. The results were so good that I do not have any pictures! I only made 6 and they were gone nearly instanteously.

Having finally achieved baking success, I was very excited to go with Mom to our very first Wilton cake decorating class on Monday night. The world was my oyster! I was thrilled beyond words - until we go to Michael's - closed due to snow. What retail store closes because of snow in Massachusetts? Sure, they cancel school and stuff, but to close a store WHEN I WANT TO GO TO CAKE CLASS? Bah humbug! Mom and I made the best of it, though. As mentioned in my last blog, I had a friend's birthday coming up and was anxious to try out a couple different cupcake recipes for that occasion.

I had seen a book at Bed Bath and Beyond that had caught my interest. It was all about specialty cupcakes and since then I had it in my mind that I would do some sort of Caribbean theme for Jeff's birthday cupcakes. The two problems that arose were as such - 1) I did not buy the fun cupcake book when I first saw it, and subsequently was unable to look up any cool cupcake decorating ideas, and 2) It is March. Most cupcake decor items are all about St. Patrick's Day or Easter right now, not anything related to beaches. Since Michael's was closed, I went to I-Party.

At a loss for ideas after a paltry showing in the "luau" section, I got creative. I bought blue fondant to represent water; I got paper umbrellas; I bought plastic palm trees; I bought gummy sharks. I planned to use brown sugar as sand and just do my best to create beach scenes on pineapple cupcakes topped with butter rum frosting. Here were the results: Some had sharks, some had the umbrellas; I just tried to make a tropically-themed island of cupcake fun. In the future, I hope to do more wildly creative things like shape the trunk of a palm tree from rice krispie treats and craft the fronds from fondant - however, for now, I was quite happy.


Wanting to try a second recipe, and having had a craving for oreos after seeing the recipe, I also made some cookies and cream cupcakes. The batter of the cupcake, as well as the frosting, called for pieces of oreo cookies. My bad habit, as I have come to realize, is over-processing in the food processor. I ended up with oreo crumbs instead of pieces. It made the frosting look more like some kind of roofing cement than the tasty treat it was, but looks aren't everything.


These cupcakes were a fan favorite. I also got a little creative and played with the fondant to make a D loves M variation on the cupcakes. Fondant is quite fun, and I am hoping this is a tool that I will learn about more as I progress through my cake decoration education.

As I mentioned, since cake class was canceled, Mom and I were left with nothing to do. After shopping at I-Party, we decided to retreat back to my house and bake all of the above goodies. Mom's favorite thing lately has been madeleines. These are a spongy, French cake-like treat that you need a special pan to make. On the shopping day with Mom and Gram, I bought one of these pans to help curb Mom's cravings. She kept seeing madeleines at work and wanting to try them. She even fantasized about cutting them open, slathering them with seedless raspberry jam, and dipping them in chocolate the long way. Well, her wish was my command. I made my first batch of these a few weeks ago. I wasn't terribly impressed, but Mom was overjoyed by the treat. Monday night, while she perused my baking library, I committed myself to making the batter.

Upon reading the recipe, I had forgotten that you are best served by allowing the batter to chill overnight. I had neglected this step the first time around out of sheer excitement to try out my new creation. This time, I was much more patient and allowed the batter to do what it needed to. I baked the cakes on Tuesday, allowed them to cook, cut them and filled with a triple berry jam. The final step was the chocolate application. This is the part I am worst at. But I was able to deliver to Mom on Tuesday night a batch of her new favorite snack - madeleine sandwich cookies. I have a very bad habit of over-filling the pan with batter, and occasionally I overbake them. Madeleines are something I can only improve upon cooking the more I make them.

Yesterday, I was the leftover gourmet. I looked around at what I had in the cupboard in order to satisfy my sweet tooth craving. I noticed I had some ricotta from the other night, but not a great deal. I made the mistake of preparing parts of the ricotta walnut cheesecake cupcake recipe before reading through the whole thing. Silly me - the recipe called for 2.5 cups of ricotta and I had nary 10 oz. I had to scale back on the wet ingredients and try my best to stretch it to make 12 cupcakes. The recipe had no flour in it, so I couldn't stretch the batter that way. Instead, I used extra walnuts and baked for nearly ten minutes longer than the recipe called for. Coming out of the over the cupcakes did not seem to hold up very well, however after some chilling, and the application of a very delicious caramel icing, the cupcakes proved a success.

Lastly, my final venture was an attempt to use the extra graham cracker crumbs that were prepared for the ricotta cupcakes. I put it into an 8x8 metal baking dish, pressing it well into the bottom, and made a variation on magic bars. I did not have coconut, but I had some sweetened condensed milk. I poured half a can over the crumbs, then allowed to chill for ten minutes. The milk stiffened slightly, and allowed me to spread a layer of raspberry jam over the top of it. The jam and the sweetened condensed milk combined a bit, but tasted very nice. For the topping, I took walnut halves and coarsely cut them and covered the top. This baked in the oven for thirty minutes and I allowed it to cool for over an hour. I chilled them a bit before cutting, and these bars turned out to be quite good. They were a little sweet, as they contained the milk and the jam, but the texture was quite nice. Even Biscuit didn't mind them. He did make the comment, however, that if I am going to make any kind of magic bars, I should just stick to the original. I agreed, but noted that I had no chocolate, coconut, or butterscotch in the house. I worked with what I had.

The recommendation with these bars (other than to not make them in the future) was that they should stay chilled. Giving these little bars too much exposure to room temperature will cause the sweetened condensed milk layer to soften and become a little soupy. Sticky fingers are no fun.

But speaking of sticky fingers, I'm off to see what I can create this weekend. Hopefully I will have something new to blog about tomorrow!