A Word from the Northeast

Bill's response to the pumpkin ginger muffins:

"I really like a) the fact that there is perceptible pumpkin flavor, and b) the ginger flavor -- it's noticeably different from using dried ginger from a jar."


Yay to getting a response other that "Mm, it's good" or "I don't really like this."  I'm excited about this!

Erm...and happy Halloween you guys.

Attempting a St. Louis Gooey Butter Cupcake

Up until three days ago, I had never heard of a gooey butter cake. It was brought up by Bill, who wondered if one such cake could be turned into cupcakes. After looking it up, I decided that the cakes looked delicious and that there was no reason there couldn't be a cupcake version.

Now, since I've never actually tried an authentic (or any) version of a gooey butter cake, I have no idea if the taste, texture and so on are going to be correct. Also, I'm pretty sure mine are going to fall apart as soon as I unwrap them. There was trouble.

So there's the finished, wrapped product. How did it hold up after unwrapping?

You can see there's a clear division between layers, but all in all it holds together pretty well. As for taste, I would compare it to a fantastically gooey Christmas cookie. So buttery and good. Like I said, I've never taste the real deal, but these are good regardless. I just have to work out a few structural problems and I'm golden. Oh, and I think these would be great as a mini-cupcake. So good.

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Gooey Butter Cake Recipe (adapted from Cooking with Joey's recipe)

2 c flour, separated
1 1/4 c sugar, plus 3 tbsp
1/3 c butter, plus 3/4 c butter (I used a wee bit extra than 1/3)
1/4 c light corn syrup
1 egg
2/3 c buttermilk (he used evaporated milk, but I found out too late that mine was waaay expired)

Mix 1 c flour and 3 tbsp sugar together in mixing bowl. Cut in 1/3 c butter until mixture resembles fine crumbs and starts to cling. Spoon by the heaping tablespoon and pat down into 16 cupcake liners .

For Filling: Beat 1 1/4 c sugar and 3/4 c butter until combined. Beat in egg and corn syrup until just combined. Add flour and buttermilk, alternating between the two and beating in between. Scoop into liners over flour. Bake at 350 degrees for 16-19 until just about firm. Sprinkle with powdered sugar if desired.

Halloween Frankensteins and Eyeballs

Okay, my intention for Halloween was to try out some different cupcakes before deciding what to make for the actual day. I only ended up trying one kind, but oh well.

I went with the Frankenstein chocolate cupcakes and some mini eyeball vanilla cupcakes made from Cupcake Project's sour cream cupcakes with this frosting. The irises are made from Lifesavers gummies, the veins and the pupils are decorator frosting.

On a more important (kind of) note, daylight savings time is granting us a whole extra hour of cheesy scary movie and candy eating time. I highly recommend Troll 2. It's a fantastic little movie about...goblins. Not trolls.

Pumpkin & Ginger Muffins II

After the first batch of ultimately displeasing pumpkin & ginger muffins, I knew a better batch was eventually going to get made. Something chock full of both pumpkin and ginger that exemplifies fall (okay, and spring in the case of the ginger, but let's be real here, ginger is a fall flavor).

These are definitely better than the first batch, but they still aren't perfect. The pumpkin taste is just not there, even though the ginger is just right in my book. It creates a decent pop in texture and a not-too-harsh tingle in your throat. My goal is to get the opinion of someone who has a more refined palette than I to see what he thinks. I'll let you know how that works out.

The recipe I worked with was from Crumbly Cookie. Aside from slight changes, I doubled it because a batch of eight? Is just not enough.

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Pumpkin & Ginger Muffins

2 c flour

2 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp salt

2 tsp cinnamon

2 tsp ground ginger

1 c candied ginger

2 eggs

1/2 + 1/8 c packed brown sugar

1 1/4 c pureed pumpkin

6 tbsp butter, melted

4 tbsp milk

Mix flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, ground ginger and cinnamon and candied ginger together in large bowl. In separate bowl, whisk together sugar and egg until combined. Whisk in pumpkin, butter and milk. Add pumpkin mixture to flour mixture and fold in until just combined. Bake for 20-22 minutes at 350 degrees. Makes 16.

Chai Cupcakes (500 Cupcakes)

There was this little coffee shop near my house that I didn't get to go to very often before they closed, but they served the best chai latte I've ever had. I think of that place whenever I hear about anything chai related, including these cupcakes from 500 Cupcakes.

These cupcakes taste nothing like chai tea. They taste, in my opinion, like buttermilk biscuits. Which isn't bad! It's just not what I was in the market for. I suspect I'm at fault, using maybe the wrong kind of chai powder.


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Chai Cupcakes

2 c self-rising flour (I used 2 c regular flour mixed with 2 1/2 tsp baking powder and 1/8 tsp salt)
1/4 tsp baking powder
pinch of salt
1 tbsp chai tea powder
1/4 cup sweet butter, softened
3/4 c packed light brown sugar
2 egg whites
2/3 c buttermilk

Mix together flour, baking powder, salt and chai powder. In large bowl beat butter and sugar until creamy. Add egg whites and beat well. Gradually add in flour mixture and buttermilk. Mix until combined. Fill liners about 2/3 full and bake for 20 minutes at 350 degrees. (I only just realized that it said 350 and not 375, but nothing terrible happened so phew!) Makes 12.

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The frosting was a cream cheese frosting that I added cinnamon to in a last ditch effort to spice up these cupcakes. It didn't really work. It's very cream cheesy. That's all I've got to say about that.

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Cream Cheese Frosting

1 c cream cheese, softened
1 1/2 c powdered sugar
1 tbsp lemon juice
1 tsp vanilla
(1/2 tsp cinnamon?)

Mix cream cheese and sugar together. Beat in lemon and vanilla until smooth. Add optional cinnamon.

Pumpkin Butterscotch Cupcakes

A few years back I made some pumpkin butterscotch cookies for some friends of mine. You could taste the pumpkin so clearly without it being *too* pumpkiny, while the butterscotch held its own nicely. Tonight I attempted to turn that into a cupcake.

These don't taste anything like those cookies, but are still really good regardless. My biggest problem with them is that they don't have the defining pumpkin taste I wanted. I seem to fail at bringing the pumpkin flavor out of things.

These are good enough that they don't actually need to be frosted, but I would never send a cupcake into the field naked. That's preposterous.  The frosting I made for these works in flavor, but not in consistency. It sort of started liquefying as I was using it. So! I'm putting that in the tasty failure bin.

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Pumpkin Butterscotch Cupcakes

2 c flour
2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp pumpkin pie spice
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp salt
8 tbsp butter
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
2 tbsp milk
1 1/2 c pureed pumpkin
1 1/2 c butterscotch chips

Mix together flour, baking powder, baking soda, pumpkin pie spice, cinnamon and salt in medium bowl. In separate bowl, beat butter until creamy. Add sugar and brown sugar. Add in eggs and mix until well blended. Mix in half of flour mixture, followed by the milk and vanilla, followed by the rest of the flour mixture. Add pumpkin and mix until well combined. Fold in butterscotch chips. Fill liners about 2/3 full and bake at 350 degrees for 18-22 minutes. Makes 16.

Pumpkin & Ginger Muffins (500 Cupcakes)

Oddly enough, the first recipe I chose to try from my 500 Cupcakes book was a muffin, which is not a cupcake. NOT a cupcake. This was the first non-cupcakey muffin I've had...maybe ever. That's partially why I wanted to make these. The other reason was because it's autumn (even though the snow is already here) and using pumpkin in some form is damn near obligatory.

That being said, I didn't particularly like these muffins. There was no discernible pumpkin flavor, there was no punchy ginger taste. Color me disappointed. Here's the recipe regardless:

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Pumpkin & Ginger Muffins:

2 2/3 c flour
1/3 c packed brown sugar
1 tbsp baking powder
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1/2 tsp ground cloves
1 tsp ground ginger
pinch of salt
1 lightly beaten egg
1/2 c pureed pumpkin, fresh or canned
3/4 c milk (they call for low-fat, which I didn't use)
1/3 c vegetable oil (they call for sunflower, which I didn't have)
3 tbsp candied ginger
4 tbsp pumpkin seeds (which I also didn't use, because frankly, ew)

Mix dry ingredients together in medium bowl. Beat together egg, pumpkin, milk and oil until well combined. Add the dry ingredients to the pumpkin mixture and mix until nearly combined. Fold in candied ginger. Sprinkle seeds on top of batter after you've spooned in into liners. Bake at 350 degrees for about 20 minutes. Makes 12 muffins.

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A Foray into Ginger

Okay, so I needed some candied ginger for the recipe I'm doing tomorrow. I had never worked with ginger, or properly tasted it for that matter, so I thought it would be interesting to candy it myself. I followed the instructions of this guy. How did it go? So-so. From what I can tell, I didn't drain it enough, or it was too hot when I tossed it in sugar or something else entirely. I don't think it came out quite right. What I have is a lot of sticky, syrupy ginger pieces drying on my kitchen table. And also? I don't think I like ginger very much. We'll see if I like it better baked into something.

Pecan Crust Retraction

Okay, I was a bit hasty in the judging. After being refrigerated for a few hours, I tried another cupcake. The frosting solidified enough that you can safely eat them upside down. Doing this keeps the pecans from crumbling and making a mess. It's not the most practical, but it works I suppose.

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Pecan Crust Goop:

4 oz butter (melted)
1/2 c brown sugar
1/2 c pecan cookie pieces

Mix the sugar and pecans into the melted butter. Spread evenly into the bottoms of 15-16 baking cups (I used tinfoil ones). Pour batter on top.

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That's hardly a recipe, but ah well.

Apple Cider Cupcakes with Apple Butter Frosting

I had an idea when I decided to do this recipe. I wanted to have an apple cider cupcake with a crushed pecan crust of sorts. Technically, that's what I got, but the crust part sucks and brings down the whole cupcake. Luckily, it practically falls right off and you can pretend it never existed. Both the cake and the frosting were obtained from Cupcake Project.
 
The best part of these cupcakes was the smell of autumn and apples and all that goodness that gets spoiled by winter.

Who Loves Orange Soda?

My goal for today was to make Halloween Cupcake #2. It didn't work out like that. What I ended up with was a plain (yet very tasty) cupcake that I covered in a frosting made from strawberry preserves (which was only okay).

What I was planning on doing was replacing the orange concentrate of those previously attempted orange cupcakes with orange soda to see what would happen. And what happened? Not much. The cupcakes came out very moist and rose a bit more (which I attribute to my spanking new baking powder), but they retained neither the taste nor the color of the soda. As far as I can tell, adding water would have gotten the same result.

Anywho, I had these cake flavored cakes staring me in the face, and I could have easily turned them into Halloweenies, but instead I chose to make a frosting out of jelly. As it turned out, I had no jelly, but the preserves worked fine.

I should make a note right about here. I'm not exactly one with baking terminology, especially when it comes to frosting. In this instance, I'm using the term frosting, even though I have a sneaking suspicion that it's an un-peaked meringue. I honestly have no idea. Do I care? Yes, I do, and I'm (sort of) learning, okay? Okay.

So back to jelly. I only did a quick search for a jelly frosting, and found one recipe repeated in several places. It was simple and didn't require anything I didn't have. Here it is:

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Jelly Frosting:

1/2 cup frosting
1 unbeaten egg white
2 tbsp sugar
pinch of salt

Combine all ingredients in the top of a double boiler. Cook over boiling water, beating constantly until stiff peaks form. Remove from heat. Beat until it reaches spreading consistency.

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To me, it tastes just like a fluffy, less sticky version of jelly. It's what I expected and it's what I got. I frosted 15 cupcakes and had some leftover, but I don't think I put enough on. The result is an all-around plain cupcake.

500 Cupcakes

A friend and I went to the movies tonight, and as is our custom, we went to the bookstore after. Specifically, I was looking for Bones of the Moon, which wasn't there. I was going to buy A Lion Among Men, but couldn't bring myself to until I bought Son of a Witch, which I haven't had much interest in.

Anywho, as I was perusing, my eye spotted this petite pink book that I absolutely had to have. That is how I came to own my first "cupcake compendium."

So I'll be making things out of this book on and off (mostly on I'm guessing) until I'm more knowledgeable in the wide, wide world of tiny cakes. Example: superfine sugar? What?? Who ever heard of such a thing? Not I!