Red Velvet Cupcakes

I'm not usually a cupcake person. I like the chewy comfort of a cookie; the delicious, satisfying, toothy wonderfulness. I find that cupcakes are more often than not simply used as a vehicle for some kind of horrific sugar laden topping. Some people eat cupcakes JUST for the frosting. I am not one of these people. However, I am trying to break out of my own mold a little and try something a bit different. As a result I made these red velvet cupcakes. The recipe is out of The Hummingbird Bakery book that I received for Christmas last year. Sadly, I don't often have cream cheese in my house though and decided instead to top these babies with a meringue frosting found elsewhere in the book. The frosting was alright as far as frostings go, but just to crank it up a notch I decided to utilize my creme brulee torch making the top into a veritable toasted marshmallow. I think I would still prefer the more classic cream cheese frosting in the future, but these were okay after all.

Red Velvet Cupcakes with Merinque Frosting

Cake

• 4 tbsp room temp butter
• 3/4 c. sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 tbsp cocoa
• 2 tbsp red food coloring
• 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
• 1/2 c. buttermilk
• 1 c. + 2 tbsp flour
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1 1/2 tsp white vinegar

Recipe

1. Preheat oven to 325.
2. Beat butter and sugar with paddle attachment of mixer until light and fluffy.
3. Turn mixer up to high, add egg, and beat until incorporated.
4. In a separate bowl, mix cocoa, vanilla, and red food coloring to form a dark paste. Add to butter mixture and combine thoroughly until everything is an even color.
5. Turn mixer to low and add buttermilk and flour and beat until well incorporated. Turn mixer to high and beat until smooth.
6. Turn mixer back to low speed and add salt, baking soda, and vinegar, beating for a couple more minutes.
7. Fill cupcake cups 2/3 full with mixture and bake 20-25 minutes or until cake bounces back when touched. Cool slightly in pan before cooling completely on rack.

Frosting

• 2 egg whites
• 1/2 c. sugar
• 1/8 tsp vanilla extract

Recipe

1. Put egg whites, sugar, and 2 tbsp of water into a heatproof bowl over a pan of simmering water.
2. Beat with a handheld mixer until stiff peaks form, about 7 minutes. Remove from heat and beat in vanilla.

Frost cupcakes only after completely cool.

Salvaging and Valentine's Cupcakes

So I have concluded that the divinity disaster could probably be attributed to a combination of things. The first thing is that rule number one of making divinity is to never make it on a humid day. Although I am pretty darn sure it couldn't be called a humid day I am not so sure it isn't humid in my apartment. Between all the cooking and beer making that occurs here it wouldn't surprise me to find out we generally have a relatively high humidity level. I also think I may have not achieved stiff enough peaks in my eggs. I was worried about over whipping and busting down the protein structure so may not have whipped quite as long as I should have either before OR after adding the sugar syrup. Rest assured this recipe will be tried again. I will not accept candy defeat! Anyhow, the nougat was still tasty even if it lacked the fluff so I figured out a way to salvage it. I did what any smart person would do when trying to fix a sweet-gone-wrong: I doused it in chocolate. Here is my pile of candies:


As you can see I've tried (in vain some of the times) to put fancy designs on the top. They don't exactly look professional, and there are definitely no two of the same size and shape, but they impressed my coworkers at least. I DID have a little trouble with my chocolate however. I am not awesome at tempering chocolate so throughout the "enrobing" process the amount of temper changed. Here I have an example of bad, ok, and good tempering:The chocolate at the far left has a hefty amount of "blooming" caused by chocolate that has been completely melted and cooled at an undesirable rate while not being properly seeded with well crystallized chocolate. So the chocolate becomes a little chalky, melts too quickly when handled, and generally looks less delicious. The middle chocolates don't have any blooming but do have less than awesome texture and also melt very quickly. The far right chocolates have been seeded well with chocolate of good texture that was not overheated to break down the seeds' crystallization. The result is a dark, smooth coat, able to stay at room temperature without any degradation in texture or appearance. Win! I ended up keeping most of the candies in the fridge until just before eating (to soften the nougat) so I could avoid the possible blooming since I wasn't sure how many (or which ones) were tempered correctly.
Here is a (bad) shot of the nougaty insides:

OK! Next up! I wanted to make Favorite something sweet and tasty for Valentine's day. I knew we wouldn't be going crazy this year because we are trying to save for a house, so instead of a romantic weekend away he would have to settle for some Sticky Toffee Squares. This recipe was very interesting as the batter for the cake-like base had NO sugar. The sweetness instead comes from reconstituted dates. The dates are roughly chopped and then boiled until they are soft and a little goopy and then baking soda is added which makes it all foamy and crazy!
The date mixture is then added to a bowl in which butter, flour, eggs, vanilla, baking powder, have been mixed just until combined. The recipe cautions often against overmixing and since I had used cold butter, due to my impatience, I ended up with a VERY lumpy mixture. I was suppose to bake these "bars" in an 8 X 12 pan, but I decided to go for cupcakes. The recipe made a dozen pretty perfectly. Then it was time for the topping. This is where the Sticky Toffee part comes into play. The frosting on these babies is brown sugar, butter, milk, and powdered sugar. VERY sweet. The instructions for the bars are to pour the frosting on, spread it out, and sprinkle some walnuts on top. Since I made cupcakes, and didn't want walnuts, I ended up frosting the cupcakes individually (which meant a thinner layer of frosting) and then rolled the tops in ground pecans. Here they are in various stages of dressing:
Favorite LOVED these babies! He was unsure of the topping at first because he is not a frosting kinda guy, and he wanted me to leave half naked, but once he tried one with frosting and nuts he wanted them all like that. The cupcake itself was just lightly sweet due to the flavor of the dates, and the sweetness and nuts of the topping combines to make this an utterly tasty treat. He especially liked the cupcake split, warmed and topped with vanilla ice cream. Sounds good to me. They really do look pretty yummy.

The last baking of the weekend was not such a success unfortunately. From the same book the Sticky Toffee guys came from I tried a recipe for baked rice pudding. It looked so tasty in the book! It appeared to be a cross between a creme brulee and a silky rice delight. Not so. This dessert tasty more like flan then either creme brulee or rice pudding. I know some people might think "Ooo, flan!" but I do not appreciate this version of custard. It is far too eggy, and especially with this dish, that had no sweet caramel to cover the flavor, the egg was just overwhelming. Trying not to hurt my feelings Favorite offered that maybe it would be good to eat for breakfast, where and egg flavor is more expected, but I think it should just be scrapped and never made again. Sometimes there's just nothing you can do to make a recipe taste good.

Oktoberfest-ivus!

Since the husband and I have moved into our new place we have been very busy moving in, getting married, and going on our honeymoon. We just got back from the honeymoon this past Tuesday so we figured this weekend was a perfect opportunity to show everyone our new place and to celebrate the autumn glory that is Oktoberfest. He did most of the work for this party since all of the beer was homemade. We had on tap a Peppercorn Rye Bock, a Ruby Red Hefeweisen, a Four Grain Ale, an English Mild, and of course an Oktoberfest. We drank and ate in German style (brats, knocks, sauerkraut and potato salad) so I had to make my own contribution. I made Black Forest Cupcakes. It was an awesome decision since I got to utilize so many newly acquired baking items. I used my trusty Kitchenaid to make the batter and whipped topping, my mini food prep to process the cherries (and my new safety edge can opener to OPEN the cherries), my 12 cupcake pan to do the cupcakes AND, the crowning glory, the CUPCAKE TREE.

I got the recipe off of http://www.cupcake-creations.com and it was delicious! The only problem with it was they looked so nice in my cupcake tree that no one wanted to be the first to take one and mess it up!