Alpha Bakers -- White Chocolate Cupcakes with Raspberry Cherry Buttercream

 I'm still perfecting my cupcake spin. That quick twist of the wrist, properly executed, will make your cupcake frosting look both rustic and adorable, a la Magnolia Bakery or their offshoots (my favorite without a doubt is Sugar Sweet Sunshine on the Lower East Side). To be sure, piping is the more secure way to make sure your cupcakes look pretty, but sometimes I want to be rustically brilliant (and sometimes I'm concerned that cherry chunks will get caught in the piping tip).

Those of you who know me will be surprised to hear how small the volume of my recent stress baking has been, post-election. I've been diverting more of my time into panicking, laundry, phone calls to elected officials, and more panicking, with a side of writing things on the chalkboard at work. I did make a batch of brownies, but cleverly left out the flour (they were weirdly delicious).

I decided, though, with only three recipes left in the Baking Bible bake through, that it was time to get back to some precision baking, so I made these white chocolate cupcakes with mousseline buttercream. The cupcakes are soft, egg white stabilized cake with four ounces of white chocolate melted in, and the frosting is a simple mousseline buttercream (sugar syrup, meringue, butter) with raspberry flavoring and a touch of fancy cherry jam. The spin, well, it's not perfect, but it looks rustic, right?

Alpha Bakers -- Ganache City

I like living with messy people. In fact, I like messy people in general.

That's not to say I'm in love with clothes strewn all over the floor, or dirty dishes under the bed, although those things don't bother me as much as they do some people. What I like is people who are unafraid of the odd impulses, weird tics, and dark holes that live inside them. People who embrace their bizarre habits without too much normalizing commentary and are able to allow their lives to have untucked corners.
Every time a kid starts a question with...'Is this weird...?' my heart breaks a little. Who cares? The only thing that's interesting about anyone is the weird things that they do. There's barely a point to life if all your interesting edges are rubbed off. Sometimes I find that theater people are better at just not caring about small social observances, but sometimes they just find other ones to conform to. We are all so afraid of each other sometimes. It's...weird.

Which is to say, I like to hang out with two and three year olds, who are unabashedly strange. And I have a few strange habits of my own, like obsessive baking. Lately my schedule has been a little thrown off, due to all sorts of business and the arrival of a new person in my life, a person who doesn't even care about sweets. How in the name of all that is holy did I get matched up with a person who can ignore freshly baked cupcakes? At least I know he likes me for me?

Luckily, everyone else in my life is still cupcake-mad, and so after plying my workplace with last week's Praline Tart (made, in my case, with almonds), I whipped up this week's Coconut Cupcakes with Milk Chocolate Ganache for one of my sacred weekly institutions, Nacho Friday. These cupcakes are based on one of Rose's coconut cakes, already a huge favorite in my circles, and the only changes I made were to make them gluten free (using Thomas Keller's Cup4Cup flour) for my friend who has celiac disease and, due to my general messiness and failure to retrieve the muffin pan I left at a friend's house three months ago, to minimize them. As I was having dinner with toddlers, mini-cupcakes seemed like a good way to go, although the decision was not without its own fraught moments, as you'll see.

The cupcakes, with a milk chocolate ganache, that Rose-typically was not just made with milk chocolate but with a mix of white and bittersweet, were delicious and a huge hit. Anais, one of the two and a half year olds in question, ate one excitedly and then asked for another. One cupcake for each of us, she was told, whereupon she dissolved into tears and said, 'But I like two cupcakes....'

Everyone has a fold in their smooth surface. Some of us re-use bathwater or teabags with our spouses. Some of us hang out with our exes even though it hurts. Some of us embrace the things that make us broken. Some of us chant weird lines from children's books and love Maurice Sendak and eat odd things at odd times or do whatever it is we need to stay alive. Some of us like two cupcakes.

After Anais went to bed, several of us had a few more cupcakes. Because we're grown-ass women who can do as we please. 

Heavenly Cake Bakers: Mud Turtle Cupcakes

I just watched an episode of Top Chef All-Stars where Fabio, the ridiculous and usually charming Italian madman, goes into a monologue in a Chinese grocery store about his pet turtle. Apparently, he bought one when he moved to New York, he loves it, takes it for walks, etc...and is deeply saddened by the cruelties of turtle soup.

Photo by Matt Korahais.

I don't think, though, that he'd mind these cupcakes. They don't so much look like turtles as sport that classic 'turtle' flavor combination: chocolate, caramel, and nuts. The base is a simple sour cream cocoa cupcake. The ganache was supposed to be dark chocolate, but my bodegas (even the fancy one) failed me, and it became a Hershey's milk chocolate whipped ganache, over which my bitter caramel sauce dripped nicely. I rarely buy pecans, so the nuts of choice were walnuts, as they have been in the last two Rose cakes that I made (one is upcoming, for free choice). I didn't eat one yet, but I tasted all the components. My taster, who is also my long-lost photographer, home from the opera wars, approved of them, looking askance at the number that I proposed to bring to work. As I work with about four people, he's probably right.

Photo by Matt Korahais.

So happy to have Matt back in the home and back at the tripod--I did extra special food styling tonight to feed his hobby. But he leaves again in not too long, so I'll be needing to get my camera fixed.

Those of you waiting for Lisbon updates, they're coming. Had to wait for most of my pictures to arrive, and I'm still waiting for five minutes to stop, breathe, and reflect. But in the meantime, enjoy the cupcakes.

Heavenly Cake Bakers: Iffy Chocolate Baby Grands

Rose calls her version of these cakes 'Designer' Chocolate Baby Grands. Due to some improvising and some bad reading of directions, that's not exactly what happened to me. They taste good, but there were some textural issues. The recipe is a three step process, beginning with cupcakes made from Rose's German Chocolate cake recipe, also the base for the recent ice cream cake.

The cake is an oil cake, and is soft and not ridiculously sweet, using only cocoa in the batter. I misread the instructions slightly, and instead of filling the cupcake wrappers less than half full, with 3/4 of an inch left over, I filled them 3/4 full. I should have caught on when I didn't have enough for all of the wrappers, but I just figured mine were bigger, as I didn't use the double foil wrappers Rose recommends. It was only when I realized that my last little underfilled wrapper had risen to exactly the right height that I took another look. This is baking before breakfast.

The next step was to poke a lot of holes in the cupcakes and soak them in a milk chocolate glaze. No problem there. I made a half-recipe of glaze because I was low on cream. This will be important later. With my lower cupcake yield, half was perfect.

The final step was the infamous Heavenly Cakes laquer glaze, which is made with gelatin for extra shininess. It is also made with cream, and I was now out of cream. Having already made the laquer glaze twice already this year, I decided that it was fine to experiment. I took some leftover ganache that was sitting around in the refrigerator, and added some gelatin, water, and corn syrup. The end result was kind of odd, like a very stiff chocolate pudding, although it tasted fine, these weren't the cupcakes I'd serve at a fancy event. I, however, plan to enjoy them very much. Several of you have been asking what fancy cake I'll have for my birthday. Behold.

UPDATE: I just ate one of these a few days later, straight out of the refrigerator, and it was surprisingly good in the lowest way possible, tasting of bodega snack cakes, a firm, glossy, stiff and chewy glaze. I kind of like them.

Heavenly Cake Bakers: Chocolate Cupcakes

Briefly, because this post is late. This is the second time I've made Rose's chocolate butter cupcakes (first was for a birthday in April), and I've found them to be moist, dense, and very reliable. I still prefer the Barts Chocolate Cake recipe because it is lighter and more durable (and full of coffee), but Rose's recipe shares convenience points with my favorite recipe by calling for only cocoa, which is in stock far more frequently than actual chocolate. Somehow the latter never lasts.

I did slip a few coffee grounds into this recipe, with no noticeable effects for good or ill. It was far too hot and humid in NYC to attempt a successful buttercream, so I frosted the cupcakes with leftover caramel ganache from my recent unsuccessful encounter with the Baked 'Sweet & Salty' cake. Then I packed the cupcakes up into a little tin, and took them camping, where they were great substitutes for the marshmallows that I'd forgotten to buy.

One recipe note: When Rose calls for cocoa in a batter, she usually instructs that the cocoa be mixed into boiling water, and then the mixture cooled to room temperature. I never feel inclined to do this extra step, and have had no trouble mixing the cocoa into slightly warm water and proceeding with the recipe. Any thoughts from anyone on what the logic here might be? Is it just to ensure that the cocoa is well and truly mixed, or does boiling water actually have some chemical effect on cocoa?

Heavenly Cake Bakers: Peanut Butter Financiers

This week's Heavenly Cake was Peanut Butter Financiers, or ingots. Fancy people make financiers in mini-loaf shaped pans, to symbolize bars of gold. Those of us who are not in high finance make them in our vintage mini-muffin pans that Miriam gave us, which makes them more of mini-cupcakes, although has few other impacts on their general composition. 

Because I made an off-schedule cake this week (Almond Shamah Chiffon with Burnt-Sugar-Apricot Mousseline Buttercream, for those who care), this was the second project of the week that required me to toast and process sliced almonds into almond flour. As recently as last week, I was using regular roasted skin-on almonds in a devil-may-care way, but sensing a lot of this to come, I sprung for some blanched, sliced suckers. They make good decorations too. I have discovered, though, that my little mini food processor does not really do a good job of processing the almonds to a full powder. Usually, I would just use pre-processed almond flour, but all of Rose's recipes very specifically avoid even the mention of that option, so I have to assume there's a reason. (According to Nigella Lawson, there's a fairly serious moisture difference between the preprocessed stuff and freshly ground almonds, so maybe that's it). 

These little cakes weren't much more than brown butter, ground almonds, whip eggs, add peanut butter. They were good, but underwhelming...just little dense peanut butter cupcakes, to which I also added a little buckwheat flour. I just made a half batch at home, and didn't take them to the bakery, as I had a sense that they would turn out not terribly impressive visually.  Still, we ate them, and are ready to move on to the next cake.

While we're here, though, I wanted to take a second to register my unease with the whole 'baby cakes' section of the book. While I appreciate a few instructions for how to convert recipes, and a few fun adaptations such as the Bostini, I think a whole section on this topic seems redundant and overly trendy. Maybe it's my lack of amusement at cupcakes in general, though, speaking sourly through my mouthful of peanut buttery goodness.

Pretty Much the Only Cupcake Post Ever Featured on Second Dinner

Or, my cousin gets married!

That was really the important part. But, as we waited eagerly for that to happen, my mother, Matt, and I spent two full days on a dream team cupcake production line, and turned out, if I do say so myself, an extremely impressive dessert extravaganza.

Here is the story of Wedding Summer '09, Preakness edition: Wedding Cupcakes.

So much to tell. So many pictures and thoughts. Good thing I'm almost a librarian. That means I can select and order--or censor if you prefer (I don't). Or, I could just be lazy and free-associate. I choose that.

First, a small meditation on the wedding cupcake. Surprisingly, it's actually more difficult to produce 250 cupcakes than one 90-person wedding cake (at least if the wedding cake is allowed to be a little rustic). Of course, it's hard to compare the two, especially when they were created in two entirely different kitchens and the cupcakes had to be transported to the venue, which the cake did not. The other major factor involved here was the recipe variety. The wedding cake required several batter mixings, but used only one base recipe for cake and for frosting. When it came to cupcakes, I overcomplicated it bit.

In the end, the great cupcake caper included four varieties of cake and three varieties of frosting:
  
Coconut Cake with Seven Minute Frosting
         
Rose Levy Berenbaum's White Velvet Cake with Wineberry Buttercream
              
Barts' Chocolate Cake with Mocha Buttercream

Lemon Cake with Lemon Buttercream (Sugar Sweet Sunshine Recipe)

For both the mocha buttercream and the wineberry I improvised using this Martha Stewart recipe for Strawberry Meringue Buttercream, and was very satisfied with the results, although heat and time constraints worked against it.

The wineberry version was slightly easier to work with than the chocolate, and held a firmer peak, possibly because of the added pectin from the wineberry jam.







My mother, who did the largest share of the frosting (this, she says is how she 'gets [her] ya-yas), became expert with the oversized tip pictured above, using one large squeeze and topping it off with a smaller one for the frilly design at right.


We used the same method for the mocha cupcakes, and sprinkled them with shaved chocolate. Later on, Matt also improvised a swirl adaptation of the frill. 

Although the process was certainly not  at peak efficiency, it was a lot of fun, and it would have been impossible without the complete and selfless support of my parents, who donated their kitchen to the messy, buttery, overheated, outlet-blowing enterprise, and then helped withevery facet of it from groceries to delivery, of Matt, who separated eggs, frosted, put up with me, took me swimming, and took most if not all of these beautiful pictures, of Nicki, who researched and procured six unique cakestands, and of Ellen, Hayat, Drew, and all the others who dropped by and pitched in.

Next time, I would streamline a bit, possibly making more of the cupcakes from the same cake recipe and then just varying the icings. Even the icings could have been restricted to those that used one frosting mode, but the overwhelmingly positive response to the Seven Minute Frosting, which can't be piped,  suggests that it was worth the trouble. The coconut cake recipe (to which I added coconut, it actually contains none) was better than the White Velvet cake, which staled quickly, but the advantage of making both of them was that one uses all yolks and one all whites. However, since all the frostings except the lemon buttercream used egg whites as well, the problem could have been better solved by not making any cake that involved egg whites, as we wound up with a large leftover jar of yolks, and I had to make challah a few days later.

Oh. And there was a wedding. I wore red lipstick. There was a tropical storm. And a photo booth. I picked out the weirdest horah ever (sorry Michelle). It was simple and friendly and ever so slightly awkward. It was sweeter than sweet.

It was just like Becky and Michelle, who are many things but above all good good people, and happy in one another. I was so lucky to be there, and equally lucky to get to hang out with the brides all week, and have swimming and questionable Chinese food. Lucky to have my sister home for a moment. Lucky in family and friends and swimming in lakes and swimming in butter. It was a good week. 

Lemon Conquers Sweetness

This post is part of a longer series about my wedding cake explorations. To follow the saga from the beginning, search for all posts labeled 'wedding cake', or just look here for the basics.

Today I'd like to share with you one of the first of my early wedding cake tryouts. I was talking with Stacey and Avi about the flavors and textures that they'd like for their wedding cake, (I'll discuss shape at some later date), and I asked them to make me a list of possible flavors and flavor combinations that would really turn them on--old favorites and new fancy blends.

Stacey's first email on the subject ran something like this:

"...lemon cake with three-berry filling and lemon buttercream. Also [Avi] likes white cake,anything with a jam filling. As you know, I love nuts and anything made from eggs, sugar and milk. i also like lemon, and coconut, and almonds.

how about white cake with one layer filled with berry and another with lemon curd, and the whole thing frosted with whipped cream? could that be left outside? or something with egg whites? what would happen if you combined the two?

maybe toasted sliced almonds on top?

trifle in cake form, is I think what i am asking for here :)"

Clearly, white cake base it is, fluffy and soft with just enough texture to stand up to fillings and layering. These two are hard to disappoint, they love so many wonderful flavors and textures. And, as Avi so sweetly said,

"I will just add that I don't think you should feel you have to incorporate everything we throw at you. We'll taste whatever you make and then say, "this is good, maybe we can change this, etc.""

They are ready for anything, and on their happy day, anything delicious will probably make them happy. That said, this is a gift, a wedding gift, and I would like it to be just that much more special. I want them to have lots of input and have exactly what they want, but I also want to put my spin on it, so that it can be a bit of joyful surprise. As both of them are regular readers, some innovations may not make it onto this blog in spite of exhaustive wedding cake research, because I would like there to be some surprises left in life.

After a later conversation, at which we made the tentative decision to have two differently flavored (and possibly colored) cakes, Stacey wrote out this flavor list for me to refer to:

"favorite flavors:

caramel / dulce de leche
custard - rich vanilla eggy
lemon - especially lemon buttercream which is tangy and sweet like
sugar sweet sunshine lemon frosting
strawberry (i actually like it better than raspberry)
coffee!
almond!
ginger! with lemon!
regular vanilla"

One of these cakes will definitely be heavy on the lemon and berries or ginger. For the other, my first impulse was something less fruity, some riff on coffee/caramel/dulce de leche, maybe with pastry cream. As you see above, one of the cakes that is a shared favorite for Stacey and myself is the lemon cupcake with lemon buttercream at Sugar Sweet Sunshine on the Lower East Side. I am not a huge fan of the cupcake craze, but Sugar Sweet transcends genre and makes some incredible cake--I love their lemon cupcake, and the strawberry trifle made with their lemon cake makes both of us swoon. In fact, I had already planned to take the SSS lemon cupcake as a template for one of the four planned cupcake flavors for Becky and Michelle's wedding the following week.

I was thrilled to find that SSS had done half of my work for me by generously posting their recipe for my favorite cupcake on a website called Crave New York. I tested it immediately. And it is perfect. It makes a light, delicate, lemony cake, and a strong, sweet, tangy, slightly crunchy, classic buttercream icing. Matt, who has far less tolerance for tart flavors, found it too intense, and said that the 'lemon conquers the sweetness', but I could have eaten the entire batch. This exact recipe, with no alteration, is perfect for Cupcake #1. I'll have Becky taste it when she's down next week, but I'm pretty sure it's perfect. Perfectly perfect.For the larger cake, I might want to try one or two alterations. I may try to give the cake a little bit more structure--(more egg, maybe?) so that it holds up better to aggressive filling, frosting, and layering, and might want to smooth out the frosting a bit with some corn syrup. It will still form a crust, but it will be a fancy crust. I have found online a method of smoothing hard buttercream so that it looks almost like fondant. Looks like fondant, tastes like buttercream. I smell wedding. I'll try that out when I do the taste test for Stacey and Avi.

All in all, this trial was a huge success, and I'm happy to have snagged a perfect cupcake recipe quite independent of all wedding cake endeavors.Also, just a note on my mixer, which will be making more frequent appearances these days. It is a very old model, salvaged by my mother and Judy from the Welfleet swap shop for my birthday present. At first, I didn't use it much, as it isn't up to bread and it's usually easier for me to mix cookie and cake batter by hand. But now that I am working with temperamental cakes and icings, making white cake all the time, and doing complicated recipe math most of the time, it's a godsend, and I'm having a lot of fun mastering its idiosyncratic turning mechanism, which works about half the time, and the other half I spin by hand. I have a feeling the mixer and I are going to become very good friends this summer.

I've included the recipe for the lemon cake/cupcakes, in slightly altered form, below.

Lemon Cake with Lemon Buttercream
Slightly adapted from Sugar Sweet Sunshine

Ingredients:

• 2 sticks unsalted butter, room temperature
• 2 cups granulated sugar
• 3 cups cake flour (I usually ignore instructions that tell me to use cake flour, and that is fine for everyday, but if I'm really trying to make a perfect cake, I have started to cave. I don't love all the bleaching and processing, but it does make finer cake. Subbing some cornstarch or potato starch into regular flour is a good though not perfect alternative).
  
• 3 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/8 teaspoon salt
• 4 eggs
• 1 cup fresh lemon juice
• 2 tablespoons lemon extract (optional-I added the zest of two lemons instead)
  

Method:
1. Preheat oven to 350°. Grease and flour (or spray with Baker's Joy) 2 9" cake pans.

2. In a large bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder and salt.

3. In the bowl of an electric mixer on medium speed, cream the butter and sugar. (I have been learning a lot about creaming lately, and the single most important fact I've learned is that you should cream for a lot longer than you think you should, until it is very very fluffy. Usually I just cream to combine, and I have learned my lesson). Add eggs, one at a time, continue mixing on medium speed.

4. In a small bowl, combine lemon juice and lemon extract/zest.

5. Alternate adding flour mixture and lemon mixture to the creamed ingredients until well incorporated.

6. Evenly divide cake mixture among cake pans. Bakes for 25-30 minutes (less for cupcakes) or until a toothpick inserted into the center of each comes out clean. Cool in pans on wire racks.

Lemon Buttercream

• 2 sticks butter, room temperature
• 9 cups confectioners sugar
• 3/4 cup fresh lemon juice
• 2 tablespoons lemon zest
• (possible two tablespoons corn syrup--I'll check back in on this one)

Cream the butter, confectioners sugar, juice, and zest until smooth and creamy. Frost and fill as desired.

Makes 1 2-layer cake or 24 cupcakes