Peeps Cupcakes

I find myself, whenever I am bored or hungry, flipping through foodgawker or using my stumbleupon (which is only set to bring up new recipes). I love the food porn available and the fascinating things people can do with food. In case you hadn't noticed, I love food blogs especially. I like cooks with a voice, bakers who have other lives, chefs with secret passions they only wish to share through pretty pictures over the internet. Now I am no photographer--I lack both the camera and the skills--but if these cupcakes are anything to judge by, I just might be a (not-so-)secret fantastic baker. Upon biting into one of these, more than one of my friends asked me if I hadn't actually considered going into business with the things. They were THAT good.

In my internet wanderings I discovered this idea for frosting a cupcake with minimum time and effort, while still creating a pretty and charming effect. After trying this I found the same idea featured in Real Simple magazine and I got upset--it's MY idea!! Or at least the food blogger's idea, and my stolen idea! Geez. No one else is supposed to be this smart!

I used the Hershey’s Perfectly Chocolate Cake recipe I found here originally (a fantastic recipe, by the way, I have tried it out and it worked beautifully) with a few changes.

Adapted Chocolate Cake Recipe:

• 2 cups sugar
• 1-3/4 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 cup HERSHEY’S Cocoa
• 1-1/2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1-1/2 teaspoons baking soda
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 2 eggs
• 1 cup milk
• 1/2 cup vegetable oil
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 1 cup hot coffee
  

Pre-heat oven to 350°F

Stir together sugar, flour, cocoa, baking powder, baking soda and salt in large bowl. Add eggs, milk, oil and vanilla; beat on medium speed of mixer 2 minutes. Stir in boiling water (batter will be VERY thin). Pour batter into prepared pans.

Now the key is to bake these beauties to for only 15 minutes. Pull them out at that time, and ignore the fact that they are not done yet; that's the point. On top of each cupcake place a marshmallow (or peep). Balancing carefully, replace the cupcakes into the oven for another 4-5 minutes (4 was perfect for me). When you pull them out, push down the marshmallows to gently create cute little snowcaps.

With the peeps you will see that they expanded a bit, but as they cool they will return to peep size. These can and should be enjoyed warm, when they are at their absolute best, but even after a few days the marshmallow still remains gooey and the cake moist as well as they are wrapped up tight or kept in an airtight container. Enjoy!!!

Cake Bites

So it's the summertime now and coming home from college to see my old high school friends is always a treat. Unlike everyone else our age who gets together in the summer to go off into the woods, light a bonfire and drink cheap beer to loud music (I live in Maine) we take a...different approach to celebrating our togetherness again. I found this recipe AGES ago and posted it on my facebook to great celebration and so we all knew that we absolutely had to try making it. Apparently Cake Bites (so much easier on my juvenile brain than calling them Cake Balls...though believe me, in our sugar-induced state many junior high balls jokes were had throughout the creation of these) have been a thing for a while, but who am I to follow trends? I make what looks delicious. These looked beyond delicious. Later, when we were eating them, someone said that they were quite obviously a five year old's dream candy and it is so so true. Ridiculously true. The insane sugar rush we all partook in just MAKING them, much less eating them...but anyways. Beware giving these to children (though they are the perfect food to make WITH children!). Also beware, they are quite labor intense (though each step is ridiculously easy there are lots of steps) and veeeeeeeery messy. Have fun!



We decided that we wanted to make red velvet truffles with traditional buttercream frosting and devils food truffles with chocolate frosting and we would dip them alternately in white and dark chocolate. We cheated and used mixes and premade frosting (which broke my heart, it always does to use a mix of any kind, even for Angel Food cake, but this was about having fun not making quality) but after tasting how delicious these turned out I'm dying to do the homemade kind. It will be so much richer and tastier!! To make them you bake your cakes and then let them cool. This is the boring part. Well, not COMPLETELY boring (licking the spoon is still fun) but definitely the dullest part of the entire process.



Once the cakes are cool you can start to rip them up! This is fun and actually not very messy at all. Be sure they are completely cool though, or you'll do what we did and almost get burned several times in our eagerness to demolish cake. Then you add the frosting. This is where the messiness comes in.


Mix thoroughly. This is a great thing to let kids do (so is the mashing up of the cake). I should know; we basically had a bunch of college-aged five year olds in the kitchen this night. We got messy and smeared cake all over each, but in our defense we had eaten a lot of cake batter and it was very late at night. Then you have to roll the frosting-cake mixture into balls. Cynthia suggested using an ice cream scoop for help in forming the balls but we just dug them out of the bowl by ourselves. Once you have lots of this stuff all over your hands be careful though, it gets harder to form nice pretty uniform balls. You might have to clean it all off your hands every few dozen truffles.


Put the rolled balls into the freezer for a few hours to make it easier to dip them later. It was easy for us to wait for them because we just all put in a movie and hung out while they chilled. I must admit during this time we lost a lot of steam and when the movie was over we had to brew up some coffee along with melting the white and dark chocolate for dipping.
Cynthia says to just use melting chocolate but we didn't really feel like it and just used standard chocolate chips instead and it worked out okay. One think we learned though is make sure your chocolate stays hot--we took ours off the burner to dip and after a bit the chocolate solidified too much to be of much use and resulted in VERY messy truffles--and only take the balls out of the freezer a few at a time so that the ones sitting on the counter don't go all soft, like ours did, resulting in more messy truffles. Also, have your sprinkles ready to decorate so they look all pretty!!! Naturally ours didn't look nearly as nice as the ones shown from the original recipe, but we're a bunch of 20-somethings who just wanted deliciousness and didn't care too much for appearance.



These truffles would make excellent gifts, so long as you are more adept at making them pretty than we were. Also, buy extra chocolate because we ran out with half of the truffles still left and they are now in my freezer waiting to be finished. Which I have promised myself I will do. All in all, a much more satisfying and a better bonding activity than getting drunk in the woods, that I promise ^_^

Cadbury Cream Egg Cupcakes

I LOVE Cadbury Cream Eggs. They are one of my most favorite candies and it makes my tongue very sad (and my waistline very happy) that they are only around once a year. Now that Cadbury is owned by Hershey I was concerned that the eggs would not be as good...fortunately that appears to not be the case at all :)

Now I found this recipe using foodgawker but I have to give Peabody all the credit. She (I hope it's a she) created this recipe all on her own!!! I am only good at creating more savory recipes, never baked goods. Well, generally. But anyway. I posted the recipe to my facebook and it got such an enthusiastic response that I thought I might have to actually make them. I'd never made cupcakes with a filling before so I was very nervous, but a recipe as amazing sounding as this just might make it worth it.

I halved the recipe because I really did not want to spent a fortune on the eggs. They are EXPENSIVE before Easter and I couldn't hit the day after sales because I was going to be flying back to school that day. But when my amazing boyfriend found them for $1.50 for 4 eggs at his local supermarket I had to give in and buy them. It was a sign! Besides, these eggs are also my father's favorite thing in the world (after Lucky Charms) so at least I knew someone beyond me would eat them.

I wanted originally to make minicupcakes, since that was what Peabody recommended, but we don't own any minimuffin tins. Sad. I looked into buying one but really couldn't justify it for this one project. Also, if I was going to learn to make filled cupcakes I should learn it the real way. So I made them normal sized.

Devil's Food Cake (for the halved recipe):

4 1/2 tbsp unsweetened cocoa powder
2/3 cups cake flour (I used regular old flour)
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/8 tsp baking powder
2 ounces unsalted butter, at room temperature (this is half a stick)
2/3 cups granulated sugar
1 large egg, at room temperature
1/4 cup water
1/4 cup whole milk

Preheat the oven to 350 F and grease the muffin pan.
Sift together the cocoa powder, flour, salt, baking soda, and baking powder in a bowl.
Beat together the butter and sugar about 5 minutes until smooth and creamy in another bowl. Add the egg. (I did this all by hand; we don't own a standing mixer or anything like that. I basically just creamed the butter and sugar together and then added the egg to get the texture.)
Mix together the water and milk. Stir half of the dry ingredients into the butter mixture, the add the water and milk. Finally stir in the other half of the dry ingredients. If you're like me you need to be extra careful to mix slowly; I made a huuuuge mess :P
Fill cupcake pans 2/3 of the way full with cake batter.


Apparently Peabody has a different definition of "2/3 of the way" because only filling mine about halfway I only got 10 cupcakes rather than the 12 promised, but knowing me I could have just miscalculated something somewhere.
I baked mine for about 17 minutes and they turned out juuuuust drier than I would have liked so I would recommend 16 minutes. However every oven is different (duh) so I'd ACTUALLY recommend baking for 15 minutes and then checking and depending on where the cake is going minute by minute from there. Regardless, they smelled lovely and dark chocolate-y.

While the cupcakes cooled, I had to make the chocolate shell ganache filling and the egg filling buttercream frosting. Here are the ingredients for both; I made the ganache first because it has to cool to room temperature.

Chocolate Shell Ganache:

5 ounces of chopped up Cadbury Crème Egg Shell, if you don’t have enough to make 5x ounces, then add some milk chocolate chips to it
1/2 cup heavy cream (I didn't have heavy cream, so I improvised with a substitute butter/whole milk mixture)

First you have to separate the filling in the Cadbury Cream Eggs from the chocolate shell. This was when the scary stuff started; the eggs cost more than probably the rest of everything else combined. I could screw up the cupcakes and not waste a lot. Also, splitting them neatly in half was WAAY easier than Peabody led me to believe. You just take a fairly large knife (one you're comfortable with) and line it up with the crease in the chocolate, where the halves were put together in the first place. Then you press gently. I think at most two eggs shattered, and even then only a little. Then I took a spoon and scooped out the filling into a bowl, using my fingers as a spatula. Let me tell you, that stuff is STICKY. But oh-so-delicious and licking my fingers was basically the perk of the job. This was probably the most time intense part.


For the chocolate shell ganache, chop up the shells until you have about about 5 oz of chocolate (just under 1 cup). If it's not enough add some chocolate chips or something. Mine turned out close enough so I was cool with it. I had way too much ganache as it later turned out, so half of the shells should be fine (I picked out the best 10 for decorating later).
Bring cream to a simmer in a saucepan and remove from heat. Pour over chocolate. Let sit 5 minutes. (I let it sit for less. I'm lazy.)
Whisk in chocolate until smooth. Let set up at room temperature. It smelled FANTASTIC! I love Cadbury chocolate anyway, and it smelled delicious and rich and creamy just like chocolate should taste. Wonderful.


Next is the Egg Filling Buttercream Frosting:

the centers of 10 Cadbury Crème Egg scooped out
1/2 cup unsalted butter, at room temperature
3 to 4 cups powdered sugar
1/2 TBSP vanilla extract
milk to thin frosting

Mix the cream filling, butter, vanilla and 2 cups sugar until creamy. Add another cup of sugar (I only added half and it was too much). Use milk to thin.
I was a bit nervous that the frosting was too sweet but with the richness of the devil's food cake it was perfection, just as Peabody said. My major issue was that the powdered sugar had some lumps I couldn't get out. It had not been sealed properly and I'm too cheap to go buy some and too lazy to take the time to crush it all to the proper powery consistency before using it. I did my best while mixing to at delumpify the buttercream but it only sort of worked. Argh.
Time to fill and frost the cupcakes. I admit to terror. Fortunately I found this How To that made the whole process a gazillion times easier and less stressful. Of course that's not to say I did it 100% correctly, but I did a heck of a lot better than I could have.


I spooned the ganache into a ziplock bag for filling. It didn't work very well; after the first few the bag popped spilling ganache all over the countertop. I had to use a spoon to fill the rest. I also wimped out on the cones I cut into the cupcakes; they were mostly too small and shallow and there was SO much ganache left over which must be a crime in several states it was so delicious. I could have licked it off the countertop. (I didn't. I promise.)
Anyway, despite the issues with the cone system all ten cupcakes were filled and fairly nice looking with little trouble (other than my tears over wasted ganache). It was time to frost and decorate!!
Again I used the ziplock bag method to pipe on the buttercream, but MUCH more carefully. I'm not very good at decorating things neatly or prettily, so I was very happy for the shells to garnish with because it hid so many imperfections.


These tasted SO GOOD. I was actually in shock. My first bite was halfway decent, but once I got to the ganache with the buttercream and the cake itself--perfection. I actually just stopped and froze because I was so surprised by the brilliance in my own mouth. Major major kudos to Peabody for creating this bit of genius. It took me basically all day and a thousand loads of dishes (I didn't use the dishwasher, I needed to reuse too many things) to make ten of these things, but I can tell you they were worth it.

Happy Easter!!