Chocolate Sugar Cookies with Orange Decorator's Frosting

These are the teeniest tiniest little cookies. I don't know why I made them so small, but they are the perfect, pop-in-your-mouth size.

As you can see, these are about half frosting. I think it gives a much needed moisture to these otherwise dry cookies.What I discovered in making these is that I'm really not a fan of cocoa powder. It just doesn't taste right when I'm looking for a chocolaty treat. I do, however, still enjoy citrus sweets in just about every way.

The recipe for these cookies comes straight from Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking School Cookbook. The only difference is, I apparently made them bigger than she wanted because I ended up with about 20 less cookies that the recipe said I'd get. These are meant to be super small.

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Old Fashioned Chocolate Sugar Cookies

1/2 c butter
3/4 c sugar
1 egg
1/2 tsp vanilla
1 tbsp milk
1 1/4 c flour
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp baking powder
1/3 c cocoa powder

Cream butter until soft and fluffy. Beat in sugar. Add egg and vanilla and beat thoroughly. Add milk. Sift together flour, salt, baking powder and cocoa powder in separate bowl and stir into butter mixture. Mix well and arrange by teaspoon on buttered cookie sheet about one inch apart. Bake at 325 degrees for 8-11 minutes. Makes 50-60 (I got 32)

Note: These don't flatten out very much while baking, so if you're looking for a thinner cookie, flatten slightly with your fingers or a fork before putting in the oven.

Second note: This mixture is a little bit too think to spoon on, so I found it easier (though messier) to just roll them into balls my hand.

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The frosting on these is an altered version of my Christmas cookie frosting. I wanted orange frosting. This was, indeed, that, but it could be much better. I'll work on that another time.

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Orange Decorator's Frosting

2 tbsp butter
1/2 tsp vanilla
2 1/2 c sugar
1 tbsp orange juice
1 tbsp orange zest

Cream butter and vanilla until soft. Blend in sugar, juice and zest.

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So school is starting up in less than a week and I'm not sure what that's going to leave me with for baking time. If I had to guess, I'd say little to none. But! I'm not too worried about it. I'll do what I can to keep this going without massive gaps between updates.

(My birthday is next week, too. Happy birthday me.)

Chocolate Lime Cupcakes with Almond Extract Buttercream Frosting

I felt like making something today. I didn't know what, but I knew I was kind of low on sugar and butter and had some extra limes. So! I made these cupcakes.

As a jumping off point, I took a look at  Fannie Farmer's Quick Mix Fudge Cake. With a snip here and a cut there, this is what I ended up with:

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Chocolate Lime Cupcakes

1 c 1 tbsp cocoa powder (F.F. called for 3 oz chocolate and no butter)
3 tbsp butter, melted (I only had unsalted.)
1 3/4 c cake flour
1 c sugar (originally 1 1/2 c sugar, but like I said, I was low)
1/8 c Splenda (yeah, I used the little packets. It came to maybe 20 or so. Ludicrous.
1 tsp salt (originally 3/4 tsp)
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/3 tsp baking soda
1/2 c oil
2 medium limes worth of juice (a little less than 1/3 c or so) and zest
1 tsp almond extract (originally vanilla)
2 eggs
2/3 milk (originally didn't call for milk)

Mix together flour, sugar, salt, baking powder, baking soda and cocoa. Add butter oil and milk and beat on low until mixed. Add lime juice, zest, almond extract and eggs and beat until smooth. Fill 3/4 full (for nice doming action) and bake at 350 degrees for 18 to 20 minutes. Makes 13.

How do they taste? I'll go with...different. It's like chocolate with a lime kicker if I'm being kind, tainted chocolate if I'm being less so. They're not bad! They're just different.

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The frosting on these guys is, once again, this recipe. The only thing I did differently was add 1 1/2 tbsp almond extract in place of the vanilla. Then I dipped the frosted cupcakes in colored sugar.

Chocolate Cupcakes with White Chocolate Ganache

So I would hear this word "ganache" every now and again, and I had no idea what it meant. Once I *did* learn what it meant, I decided to give it a try.

I decided to try the chocolate cake recipe out of my Fannie Farmer cookbook. It's a fair chocolate cake. It's not too dry and it domes well. I wish is had a stronger chocolate flavor, but in this particular instance, it's not what I was looking for anyway.

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Chocolate Cupcakes

1/2 c vegetable oil
1 1/2 c sugar
1 tsp vanilla
2 oz unsweetened baker's chocolate, melted
2 eggs, beaten
2 c flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 c milk

Sift together flour, baking powder and salt. In large bowl beat together oil, sugar, vanilla, chocolate, and eggs. Add flour mixture alternately with milk. Fill liners about 3/4 full and bake for 18 minutes at 350 degrees.

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For the ganache, I looked to Cupcake Project. The only problem with that was that I didn't have heavy cream anymore. Used it up, what, yesterday? So I made some substitutions.

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White Chocolate Ganache

1/4 c white chocolate morsels
1/4 c milk
1 3/4 tbsp unsalted butter
1 tsp flour

Place chocolate in small bowl. Add milk, butter and flour to saucepan and heat until boiling, stirring to mix. Pour over chocolate and stir together until melted and combined. Spread over cupcakes (I actually dipped mine, but tomato tomahto.)

Sadly, there is not enough white chocolate to stand up against the regular chocolate cupcake, and it's completely overshadowed. Next time, less cupcake, more ganache.

Gooey Chocolate Butter Mini-Cupcakes

I was running low on ingredients today, so I made another batch of gooey butter cupcakes. What I discovered was that the first time around I used a severely low amount of butter. However I managed to figure it out, it was wrong yet totally delicious.

This time, I wanted to try a chocolate version. I had high hopes for a supposed-to-be-gooey chocolate cake with a crunchy-ish crust, but that's not really what I got.

These aren't bad by any means, but they aren't great. The biggest problem is that they retains none of the taste or texture of the originals. Instead, it just tastes like a so-so chocolate cake with a kind of crust.

I'm not quite through with this recipe yet. Creating the perfect chocolate gooey cupcake is now on my list of things to do.

To make these, follow this recipe, adding 2 tbsp cocoa powder when mixing in the flour and buttermilk. Put about a teaspoon of the flour/sugar mixture in each liner. Bake for about 15 minutes at 350 degrees. Makes 48 mini-cupcakes.

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.

Halloween Cupcake #1: Feed Me Frankenstein

Halloween's coming up, so I thought I'd try out some festive treats. Tonight I made some chocolate cupcakes with a chocolate whipped cream filling/frosting that are adorned by none other than Mr. Frankenstein ('s monster).

For the actual cupcake, I went with this, minus the chocolate chips. I had some troubles along the way. Not with the recipe, but more so with my ability to overfill liners (half to me is always 2/3 or even 3/4 occasionally). Also, they never quite seemed fully cooked to me. They came out a little too moist and sticky for me not to be suspect. And one more: my baking powder is waaay expired, and I do declare, it's fouling up my tiny cakes.

The whipped cream I also swiped from Cupcake Project (I always head there when an idea comes to me) , except I quadrupled it for my needs. I'll reprint it here for the sake of being efficient.

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Chocolate Whipped Cream:

2 c heavy whipping cream
1 c sugar (if properly quadrupling, you'd get 1/2 cup, but I wanted it a bit sweeter)
1/2 c cocoa powder

Beat whipping cream until soft peaks form. Beat in sugar. Beat in cocoa.

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Oh yeah. I also added some purple coloring gel to this hoping to get a pleasant shade of violet, and ended up with a gruesome shade of bleh. So there's that. 

Now on to my favorite part:

My favorite? The one on the far right in the middle row. He came out so much more terrified than terrifying. An honorable mention goes out to the impostor in the corner.

I didn't come up with these guys. I remember seeing them a few years ago in a magazine and have wanted to make them ever since. These are Fudge Grahams partially dipped in slightly melted butter cream frosting that has been dyed green (which came out so excellently green, not bleh). The eye brows and mouths are done in Wilton's black sparkle gel. The eyes are those little cinnamon candies. You know the ones. They were originally going to be M&M minis, but I had these on hand and since these are a trial run cupcake, I didn't think it'd matter. I actually do like the random burst of cinnamon that you get from these heads though. Go figure.

I was actually a little afraid to try these, thinking they'd be far too sweet for someone who may or may not have eaten a bunch of extra chocolate whipped cream and saw a tummy ache on the horizon. Still, I tried one and was rather surprised that I wasn't instantly heaving. They were just sweet enough.

As a final note, I'd like to mention that I use flash when I take closeups even though it's a no-no. I've tried everything I can to not use flash, but it is dim as the dickens around here, and I don't have the ISO speed or the steady hands to pull off a decently lit photograph. So that's that.