Cocoa Powder and Cupcakes

Normally I'm not one to be affected much by the richness of a dessert. The notable exception is peanut butter and chocolate desserts. Something about the combination of flavors, honestly, takes me to a dark place. It probably stems back to a misspent childhood of gorging myself of Reese's Pieces (also the reason circus peanuts changed overnight from my favorite to most revolting candy). These cupcakes were an effort to overcome these feelings and to do another test run of my new layer cake guidelines. Spoiler alert: success!

I'm also super excited to announce my new short ebook! It's a great little guide for creating a cake recipe that goes far above and beyond what's found on the site already. Cakery is 90% new content, and the content which is from the blog had been retooled and adjusted, in light of some research and experiments I've done since then. So if you liked the recipe development posts and want to take your cakes to the next level, there's a button in the upper left-hand corner that'll take you through a quick and easy Google Checkout so you can get the book within minutes. Did I mention it's only $5?

I'm also giving away a couple of free copies! All you have to do to win one is follow me with Google Friend Connect (the gadget is at the bottom of the page). So click the little join button (you won't get any spam, just a feed of my blog posts) and in a couple of days, I'll send the winners an email. Good luck!

A note on cocoa powder: I wanted a very chocolatey cake, bordering on bitter, and I got it. I recommend, then, not using cocoa powder for any more than 1/3 of your driers.

Ingredients:

• 4 ounces AP flour
• 2 ounces cocoa powder
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 3.6 ounces butter, softened
• 3 ounces sugar
• 1 egg
• 4.2 ounces milk
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla
• 4 ounces butter, softened
• 1/4 cup peanut butter
• 2 cups powdered sugar

Directions:

1. First, preheat the oven to about 360 degrees F. Line cupcake tins with papers and set aside.
2. Whisk together the flour, cocoa powder, salt, and baking powder. Set aside.
3. In a stand mixer, beat together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy.
4. Add in the egg and beat until combined.
5. Alternate in the driers and the milk and vanilla until all are combined.
6. Scoop the batter into the cupcake papers, filling about half full.
7. Bake for 15-20 minutes, until a toothpick comes out clean.
8. Once the cupcakes have cooled, beat together the 4 oz butter, the peanut butter, and the powdered sugar until light and fluffy. Ice the cupcakes.

What childhood candies set your stomach churning?

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Butter Cakes and You - Recipe Development for everyone

I've got a new focus for the blog (and from the sounds of it, you're all down too): recipe development. It's something I've been really into lately, and I firmly believe that coming up with your own recipes (which actually work and taste great) is something everyone can do without spending hours and hours on them. So right now, we're digging into cakes! I posted a little bit about this a few days ago in my Chocolate Zucchini Cake post, but I'd like to go into a bit more, and look at another cake formula which follows the same rules.

We'll go on to look at other types of cake later, but for now, we'll master the classic butter cakes. Pound cake, "shortened" cakes, and most other cakes that use the creaming method fit in this category.

Flour:

I always start a recipe with flour. For two cakes 9 inch rounds, I usually start with 2 cups of flour. Flour, in the world of cake ingredients, is known as a drier. This means that it gives structure and body to a cake. In the world of cake ingredients, there are also other common driers. Specifically things like cocoa powder.  Because they behave similarly, you can substitute other driers for part of your flour in a cake. It is important to do exactly that, though, and substitute. If you simply add cocoa powder to the 2 cups of flour you need for two 9 inch rounds, you'll end up with dry, tough cake. But if you follow the rules and use 2 cups of driers, you can substitute no problem. (Note: You still need to use a good amount of flour itself, however, for structural purposes.) The driers are also the one set of ingredients in cakes that you need to know both the weight and volume of.

(Note: In an ideal world, we'd all use cake flour for almost every cake, but I do realize that many of us don't really have access to it, and many of us don't like to keep uni-taskers (to borrow from Alton Brown) around. Your cake should turn out no matter which flour you use.)

Other Dry ingredients:

When I say other dry ingredients, I really mean leaveners and salt. The leaveners are the reason it is important to know the volume of the flour. To leaven one cup of flour, you need about 1 1/4 tsp of baking powder, or 1/4 tsp of baking soda. My leavener of choice is usually baking powder, unless I'm making something like a lemon cake, where I want the flavor of lemons to shine through without so much acid. Then I use baking soda, because it counteracts some of the acid in a cake. Salt is a bit more of a grey area. I usually add somewhere between 1/4 tsp and 1/2 tsp for two cups of flour, depending on the flavor of the cake. Salt in a sweet brings the flavors to the perfect level for our taste buds. Salt adds a lot to caramel or chocolate flavor, but too much salt is easily tasted in flavors like vanilla.

Sugar:

In a cake made by creaming butter and sugar together, sugar plays a greater role than just sweetening and tenderizing. Sugar is needed to trap air bubbles in the butter, which gives the cake part of its leavening. For this reason, a good amount of granulated sugar is needed. Some honey, molasses, etc can be substituted, but not much. For this style of cake, the total amount of sugars (granulated or liquid) should be equal to or slightly less than the weight of the driers. 

Eggs:

Eggs play a few different roles in cake balancing. the give structure, they moisten, they tenderize, and they leaven. The nice thing about eggs in a cake recipe is that you don't have too much choice. The weight of the eggs and the liquid combined should be equal to the weight of the driers. In this case that would mean about six eggs is equal to the weight of flour for two 9 inch rounds. But to add this many eggs would mean that you could add no liquid. Normally I try keep eggs at no more than 50% of the weight of the flour, because otherwise you have a very thick batter and are likely to get too tough of a case. 

Liquid:

Using the rule of liquids and eggs combined weighing as much as the flour, the liquid is then easy to figure out by subtracting the weight of the eggs from the weight of the flour. Common liquids for cakes are milk, buttermilk, and sour cream, but get creative! This is a great place to introduce flavors.

Butter:

Shortening is definitely NOT an option. But the amount of butter is easy to figure out, too. The weight of the butter in a cake recipe should be equal to the weight of the eggs.

And it really is that simple. Cream together the butter and sugar, add the eggs, and alternately mix in the dry ingredients and liquids. It'll take you maybe 5 minutes to write your own cake recipe using this method. I don't know about you, but I've spent a lot longer searching blogs for cake recipes.

So here's an example recipe that I came up with while writing this post. They're s'mores cupcakes, before summer ends and we all move on to holiday desserts.

Recipe:

• 1 1/2 cup flour
• 3 graham crackers (this comes out to 1/2 cup graham cracker crumbs)
• 2 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 5 oz butter, softened
• 6 oz granulated sugar
• 2 oz brown sugar
• 3 eggs
• 4 oz milk
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1/2 oz honey
• 3 oz chocolate chips
• 3 egg whites
• 3/4 cup granulated sugar

Directions:

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.
2. In a food processor, process the graham crackers until they are a fine powder.
3. Whisk together the flour, graham crackers, baking powder, and salt.
4. Cream together the butter and sugars until light and fluffy.
5. Add the eggs to the butter, one at a time, scraping the bowl between additions.
6. Add half of the dry ingredients and beat until just combined, then alternate in the wet ingredients (milk, vanilla, and honey) with the rest of the dry ingredients. Mix in the chocolate chips and spoon into prepared cupcake tins.
7. Bake for approximately 15 minutes and allow to cool.
8. Over a double boiler, gently stir together the egg whites and 3/4 cup sugar until they reach 140 degrees. Then transfer to a mixer and beat until stiff peaks form.
9. Pipe meringue onto cooled cupcakes and toast with a torch.

Texture-wise, the cakes turned out great. Taste-wise? Equally great. I would probably up the amount of brown sugar and lower the granulated a bit, as well as put a little more graham cracker instead of some of the flour, but I had a hit (according to my wonderful fiance [yes, I still pretend her opinion is unbiased]) the first time around. So please, friends, next time you go to make a cake or cupcakes, try this out! Then comment and let me know how it went for you.

Anything you're confused about?

Any special topics you'd like to see in future recipe-development posts?

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Peanut Butter Jelly Cupcakes

Sometimes I bake late at night. As anyone who has ever seen Michael Jackson's "Thriller" music video can tell you, weird stuff happens at night. And weird, in baking, can be a good thing.

Maybe some of you have seen the website Bake It in a Cake. If you haven't, stop reading now and go check it out. Some of the cupcakes on that site had me in stitches. I mean, baklava inside a cupcake? I'm totally obsessed with the concept. I'm even thinking of making it a weekly feature on the blog. But the first one I ever tried to make for myself was peanut butter and jelly sandwich filled cupcakes. This was possibly a mistake, if only for the fact that I'm now hopelessly addicted. I like to make mine with white cake and a buttercream flavored with jelly. Otherwise I think the peanut butter overpowers the jelly. So without further ado, the recipe.

Makes: 10-12 cupcakes

Ingredients:

• 4 slices of bread
• Peanut Butter
• Jelly
• 1 1/2 cups AP flour
• 1 3/4 tsp baking powder
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1/3 cup butter, softened
• 3/4 cup granulated sugar
• 1 egg
• 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
• 3/4 cup sour cream
• 4 oz butter, softened
• 2 2/3 cup powdered sugar
• 3 tbsp of your favorite jam or jelly(I like raspberry or grape)

Directions:

1. Make two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and cut them into rounds, roughly the size of your muffin tins.
2. Preheat the oven to 350 F.
3. Whisk together the flour, baking powder, and salt.
4. Cream the 1/3 cup butter with the granulated sugar until light and fluffy, scraping down the sides occasionally.
5. Beat the egg in thoroughly, scraping down the sides once.
6. Add the vanilla.
7. Mix the sour cream and the dry ingredients into the butter mixture, alternating.
8. Spoon a small amount of the batter into your prepared muffin tins. Top that bit with a round of sandwich, and fill the tin the rest of the way up with batter.
9. Bake for 12-15 minutes, until a toothpick comes clean out of the cake section.
10. Next, beat the 4 oz of butter and the powdered sugar together until light and fluffy. Add the jam and a bit of water, if needed. Pipe this buttercream onto your cooled cupcakes and enjoy.

P.S. It's been so awesome to see so many comments and views this past month, as well as to see my photos on people's tumbler pages. You guys and gals are amazing!

P.P.S. If you haven't checked out the shop tab, I urge you to head on over and let me know what you think! New stuff is going in all the time. Anything you'd like to see?

Totally unrelated question: When you visit food blogs, do you like to see content in addition to recipes, or just recipes?

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Marble Cupcakes, courtesy of Martha

I'm sure some of you out there are who are Martha Stewart haters. I was a bit skeptical at first too, but I tried her red velvet cupcakes recipe, and they turned out wonderful. So this was my attempt at making marble cupcakes with her recipes for yellow and chocolate cupcakes. Overall, not bad. The texture was great and, though the chocolate could be a bit stronger, the flavors were good too.

Yields: 24 cupcakes

Chocolate Cupcakes – from Martha Stewart

Ingredients:

• 3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder

• 3/4 cup all-purpose flour

• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder

• 1/4 teaspoon salt

• 3/4 cup (1 1/2 sticks) unsalted butter, room temperature

• 1 cup sugar

• 3 large eggs

• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

• 1/2 cup sour cream

Directions:

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.

2. Cream the butter and sugar together until nice and fluffy.

3. Whisk together your dry ingredients.

4. Add the eggs, one at a time, to the butter mixture. Be sure to mix each egg until completely blended before you add the next one. Add in the vanilla extract.

5. Pause here and make the Yellow cupcakes.

6. Stir half of the dry mixture into the butter until just blended. Then add 1/3 of the sour cream and do the same. Continue alternating the dry ingredients and sour cream in thirds.

7. Lightly stir together your yellow and chocolate cupcake batter until swirled.

8. Spoon into muffin tins until half full. Bake approx 12 minutes, until a toothpick comes out clean.

Yellow Cupcakes – from Martha Stewart

Ingredients:

• 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour (spooned and leveled)

• 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

• 1/2 teaspoon salt

• 1/2 cup milk

• 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

• 1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, room temperature

• 3/4 cup sugar

• 2 large eggs

Directions:

1. Whisk together the dry ingredients. Combine the milk and vanilla.

2. Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy.

3. One at a time, mix the eggs into the butter mixture.

4. Add the flour mixture to the butter and egg mixtures in thirds, alternating with the milk.

5. Finish making the chocolate cupcakes.

Vanilla Italian Buttercream – adapted from Gourmet magazine

Ingredients:

• 3 egg whites – room temperature

• A pinch of salt

• 1 cup sugar plus 2 tablespoons

• 3 sticks of softened butter

• 1 teaspoon vanilla

Directions:

1. Moisten 1 cup of the sugar with a bit of water in a saucepan and bring to a boil.

2. Cut the butter into tablespoons and set it aside.

3. Whip the whites and salt in a clean bowl to soft peaks. When the sugar reaches 240 degrees F, stream it into the egg whites (down the side of the bowl, not onto the whip attachment). Turn the mixer up and whip until the eggs reach stiff, glossy peaks and are cool to the touch.

4. Add the butter in small pieces, beating after each is incorporated. Beat this until smooth and pipe onto cooled cupcakes.

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