Triple Vanilla Cupcakes - Magnolia Cred

Welcome, friends, to another edition of cupcakery a la Jenn. Today I present to you the pleasures of the famous Magnolia Bakery Vanilla cupcakes.

I started with this recipe, the only additions/changes I made were to use about half a teaspoon extra of Spice House Double Vanilla Extract and top it all off with Pure Vanilla Sugar.

I had planned to make my own vanilla sugar, but as I'm a working girl with a social life, that never quite materialized. Ah, well... the best laid plans, as they say.

I must say, homemade sugar or no, everything turned out rather gloriously.



























I think the most entertaining part about all of this is seeing for absolutely certain what went wrong with the frosting my very first batch of Easter cupcakes. In my inexperience, apparently I didn't realize that a) that this is an old-fashioned butter and sugar icing recipe and not exactly buttercream, thus it is functionally different b) the order in which you add the set of mixing components was INCREDIBLY important and c) that you do in fact have to add a shit-ton of confectioner's sugar before you reach the desired consistency(I believe there was 6 cups to 2 sticks butter and a cup of milk) d) that it's texture and appearance changes as the frosting "sets". Not "sets up" as in hardens totally like cone dip but similarly.

I haven't tried one yet, since it was 10:30-ish when I finished and my guinea pig pooped out. But I have a feeling they're fabulous. I'll probably have one for breakfast or something.

Chocolate Cupcakes with Blueberry Cream Filling

Recently, one of my friends asked me how someone so skinny as me could be so cruel as to take up a fattening cupcake hobby. I've been asking myself that question a lot recently as I rack up the mixer mileage and I think the answer is simple. I love to make cupcakes. Truly. I do.

Will my new obsession undo all the hard work I've done? Perhaps. I tend to think that the muscle I've accumulated over the last year or so will hopefully make it possible for me to ably process the added caloric intake of the one or two cupcakes I eat out of every batch I make. But I'm not sure, really.

Anyway, ages ago when contemplating what to do with my life I seriously considered attending the culinary arts program at the technical college here in town. At the time I was afraid to have to start from the very lowest end of the totem pole in the professional kitchen and also afraid that undertaking my passion professionally (i.e. - be a slave in someone else's kitchen) would kill the joy. I may have been wrong but I guess at this point I've chosen my path and I'm more than fine with it. But the fact remains, I love coming up with new and interesting ways to serve food and lately that love presents itself in a little brown natural paper cup. With frosting.

So today I present to you a rather cobbled-together recipe. It's worked before a la some pumpkin-dark chocolate cupcakes I made last fall for my ex's friend's birthday party and here's hoping. The cupcakes are in the oven now and soon I will attempt to adapt a cream recipe using a random blog entry and a solid recipe. Let's see what happens - shall we?

I present for your consideration the method:

Coconut & Lime's Chocolate Cupcake recipe - with a few noteworthy additions

Basically I followed the recipe verbatim excepting:
1. I added about 1 tbsp. blueberry juice concentrate to the milk & vanilla mixture
2. I added about 1.25 oz. of Trader Joe's Belgian-style dark chocolate, very finely chopped to the final batter

Here's one of the first batch out of the oven


I think I underfilled the cupcake wrappers on the first batch. I think they look a little anemic.

But apparently, the second time's the charm.





On deck, Chockylit's Basil or Mint Cream recipe becomes Jenn's Blueberry-Lemon Cream by way of mixing Chockylit's recipe with a blog entry from Joseph Hall on the subject of simple syrups. Noteworthy additions being that I used 1 cup blueberry juice concentrate, the juice of a whole lemon and about a full tablespoon of rosewater, which I heated until 1 cup of sugar dissolved. I will mix this with the whipped cream.

Now, the cream recipe I doubled. Two cups of heavy whipping cream and I think I actually only used 8 tbsps of the blueberry syrup to fold into the cream, however.

Results:

Well, as it turns out, over-working your cream can be... uhm... interesting. One moment it's fluffy and light and glossy and gorgeous... and the next... it's REALLY fluffy and heavy. As I beat the simple syrup in to my cream I discovered this interesting little tidbit. I think next time I'll just fold it in with the spatula. None the less tasty for the wear, tho. I'll say that about it. I may or may not have sampled a, uh... little bit.

I spooned the "fluff" into the cupcake cavities. Another thing I learned - if you make small cupcakes like I do, use a small knife and be quick and shallow with your cuts. Otherwise you end up digging a little hole in the poor thing anyway and possibly take out a sidewall. After putting the tops back on, I turned my attention to making the mint chiffonade and melting my white vanilla chocolate. (God bless Green & Black) It melted nicely and I then spread a small circle of white chocolate on top. For this application I melted about 3/4's of a 3.5 oz. bar in a double boiler and worked it a bit until it was smooth.

For the decoration I used up almost a whole package of the mint leaves you find in the produce section, and created a chiffonade, I rolled the leaves the long way to create the long ribbons. And pressed some dried organic blueberries on top of that.

Here is the final result



Behind the little piece of gorgeousness you'll see the evidence of my pack-rattery. I could NOT bring myself to throw away the bits of chocolate cupcake that I cut out to make room for the cream. Why? What am I going to do with them? I don't know. And also, I don't know.

I must say I'm pleased with the final result. (A single girl standing alone in her kitchen, shoveling a cream-filled cupcake into her maw late at night might traditionally be cause for concern on a man-related depression issue, but I think I deserve an exception. Slaving for 6 1/2 hours seems to me to create a justified sense of entitlement.) Although you can't outright taste the lemon and the rosewater, you can taste a tang which might be attributable to the lemon. The cupcakes are light and fluffy so thank you again for a great recipe to start from, Rachel at Coconut & Lime. Hopefully the retiree I baked them for appreciates how hard I worked for her. It's 12:30 now. I have to be across town by 7:30 - 7:45 tomorrow which means I need to be up around 5. And this morning I had to be AT an event at 7:00. I woke up at 4:00. Yikes! Sleepiness.

Cupcake Addenda

They're even pretty BEFORE they go in the oven! Stay tuned for more Lemon-Strawberry Delight ac-tion! *claps hands* *giggles*
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And... we're back. It's evening now, post-cookout. And for the first time in the very brief history of my cupcake obsession I am cupcake-less within one day. Every last one of the little suckers got gobbled up because they are rockin' good delicioso. Seriously. Mine even had a mis-adventure in the car - wherein my friends decided that on the way to the cookout that we had to stop at the mall and I had no choice but to leave the cupcakes in the warm car which melted the buttercream frosting I made so they were decidedly unlovely but they went over like buttah at the cookout. I got soooo many compliments.

Anyhoo, here is a shot of the finished product, pre-frosting:



Aren't they pretty? They were a bit tricky to get out of the cupcake pan, and the cake part of the cupcakes split a little on one or two when I tried to lift them out but they managed to make intact. They were just itchin' to get naked and shed their papers too!

I followed Coconut & Lime's basic buttercream recipe, adding the juice of a whole lemon and some zest as recommended and it is absolutely DELISH! So very tart and tasty. And the lemon cupcake is really lemon-y and the strawberries I got were wonderfully ripe and sweet. I couldn't wait until we got to the cookout to eat one - I just had to. Here it is on it's way home to my belly:


I am so very pleased with the results. I'm going to have to make another batch because I've promised them all over town. I'll probably do that tomorrow because I'm totally exhausted now but I have PLENTY of frosting left over so that's one less thing to do.

Now, for my next trick - I go in search of the perfect vanilla cupcake. I think it will involve homemade vanilla sugar *raises eyebrows suggestively* because I am just that fou-fou.

Adventures in Cupcaking

So for the last several months I have been obsessed with cupcakes. I blame Rachel Kramer Bussel for this obsession, for it is her site Cupcakes Take the Cake that started it all. Since then I have branched out to Coconut & Lime, Chockylit, and The Cupcake Underground. All fabulous sites that you should check out when you get the chance.

These days I wait patiently for my next excuse to steal my mother's hand blender, dig out the cupcake liners, and my $30 muffin pan and make beautiful cupcake. The first chance I got was on Easter, when I attempted to adapt Cupcake Underground's Chocolate Lavender Cupcake recipe to suit me and came up with Flourless Chocolate Cupcakes (via Epicurious) and Underground's Lavender frosting recipe - which is not so much a recipe as it is some very vague instructions. Sort of like Camilla Engman's instructions on how to make her adorable critters (which I WILL attempt someday, when I learn how to knit and crochet.) The major problem with the frosting, I believe, is that I was attempting to adapt a vegan recipe to be dairy-based.

Normally I would have checked out how to do a traditional cream cheese frosting and I think I might have - I can't quite remember - but one way or another there was no butter involved when I did this. A rookie mistake. I bought cream, cream cheese, powdered sugar, hibiscus blossoms, and lavender flowers. I adore cooking with lavender so this was an exciting chance for me to integrate it into a dessert. I put the cream on the stove and the lavender and hibiscus blossoms in, and attempted to simmer the cream. Oh, what a bad idea. The first attempt was a total flop. Everything appeared to be going well until all of a sudden - the cream clotted. It looked absolutely awful. I'll spare you the detailed description because it might spoil whatever meal you happen to reading this near. The second attempt was not so bad. The cream turned a lovely pinkish-purple color and didn't clot (though, the blossoms when removed did not exactly escape unscathed by their harrowing creaming experience). Then I started blending the cream cheese and powdered sugar, which was going pretty all right until I added the cream. That was when everything went wrong. Little dots of sparkly powdered sugar started forming, giving the appearance of snow - which, while kind of pretty in its own way, was definitely not what I was going for.

The cupcakes turned out fabulously. They were very dense and tasty. Another rookie mistake I made was frosting them as soon as they'd cooled. And, being slightly nervous about the idea of leaving cream cheese frosting out of the refridgerator I immediately stuck them in a container and into the fridge they went. I didn't research enough to know that that was pretty much all right but that I needed to bring them to room temperature before I served them to anyone. Otherwise they were like tiny fudgy-brownie-like matza balls. They were very pretty and the purple was very Easter-y. I put a few little lavender blossoms on top for decoration (no pictures of the results, sorry) - unfortunately the only way you could taste any lavender at all. The frosting swallowed any hibiscus or lavender flavor the cream simmering had attempted to give it. Lessons learned. Next time, I make a simple syrup I think.

I took my lumps and the next opportunity I had to get my hands in some batter was my friend Tim's birthday. Every year I do a southern-themed cooking extravaganza and this year I chose Red Velvet Cupcakes. I chose a recipe from Coconut & Lime and used her Cream Cheese Icing recipe as well. This time, I beat the hell out of that frosting. It rocked. It was perfection. These were the results:



I was very, very proud. I shared them with anyone I could convince to take one. Last time, I ended up throwing out a number of leftover cupcakes. This time, I threw out not a one. And Tim was verrah happy -


My new adventure is about to begin today. Ages ago, I saw a picture on the interwebs of a cake with sliced strawberries inside and I thought, could I not do this with a cupcake? And could not the strawberry be whole? I thought about doing a lemon chiffon cupcake with a whole strawberry sunk inside but I could not for the life of me find a lemon chiffon cupcake recipe. I do not pretend that I am experienced enough to take a cake recipe (which is all I could find) and adapt it to anything. I am a newbie. I must accept my limitations. So I went to the expert, Rachel at Coconut & Lime and requested help in locating a recipe. I related my idea and she had some thoughts - 1) That chiffon cupcakes are tough to do all by themselves and 2) That chiffon might not be dense enough to support the strawberry. Now, I had actually wondered about the second point but I hadn't thought of how the upside-down cooling process might work with a cupcake. But Rachel volunteered to test drive the idea and the results are posted on her site.

I'll post my results after I've made them, which should be this afternoon. But three cheers for Rachel for being a great sport and for helping me out!