Cupcake Hero: Pumpkin + Halloween

The Cupcake Hero roundup is posted now. I didn't realize it, but there was a Halloween theme, and some very creative recipes and spook-tacular decorations! If your name is Kate, or you are a fan of Halloween, you're not going to want to miss this!

Cupcake Hero: Pumpkin

I can tell that I'm a bit out of practice with the whole heroic cupcake thing, and it's also showing that I was short on time. But the cupcakes were yummy! Here's what I did:

Pumpkin Whoopie Cupcakes

For the Cupcake:
I used Joy of Baking's cake recipe forWhoopie Pies. The only thing I modified was the baking times.

Pumpkin Cakes:

3 cups (390 grams) all purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
1 1/2 teaspoons ground ginger
1 teaspoon ground cloves
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup (226 grams) unsalted butter, room temperature
2 cups (410 grams) light brown sugar
2 large eggs, room temperature
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1 - 15 ounce (425 grams) can pumpkin puree

For Pumpkin Cakes: Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (177 degrees C) and place oven rack in the center of the oven. Line two baking muffin tins with cupcake papers.

In a large bowl whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, ground cinnamon, ground ginger, ground cloves, and salt.

In the bowl of your electric mixer, fitted with the paddle attachment (can also use a hand mixer), beat the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. Beat in the vanilla extract and pumpkin puree. Beat in the flour mixture just until incorporated. Fill cupcake papers about 3/4 full. With moistened fingers or with the back of a spoon, smooth the tops of the cakes.

Bake for about 18-20 minutes or until the tops of the cupcakes, when lightly pressed, spring back and a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean. Remove from oven and transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.

This actually makes a cupcake that is very closely related to a muffin prior to frosting. We even had them for breakfast. But when I finished them they were definitely cupcakes!

For the filling: Dark Cinnamon Ganash.

I made WAY too much ganash, and have to figure out what I want to do with the leftovers. (Anybody know how long this stuff keeps?) Anyway, Joy of Baking provided me with the recipe again: 1 part cream to 3 parts chocolate. I used Ghirardelli's 60% dark chocolate, and I added a teaspoon of cinnamon, which I think was not quite enough.

For the frosting: Cream Cheese Frosting

This is where I really cheated: I used a tub of Betty Crocker. But if it wasn't homemade, I didn't have any complaints! I simply didn't have time to do homemade.

And the whole "they're supposed to be Halloween-y" thing? I didn't get the memo until after the cupcakes were made and eaten. But it was fun anyway. Better luck next month, right?

Cupcake Hero Returns!

I have long been sad, though understanding, about the lack of Cupcake Hero challenges. Slush was making waaay too many cupcakes, and it just wasn't sustainable. But it appears that there are new rules and perhaps a new "Contest Mom" (I can't tell for sure, looking at the new site), and they are back in business! October's theme is pumpkin, and we have until the 15th to make something brilliant. What fun!

Cupcake Hero: Better Late than Never

Right. So, this is June's cupcake. Let's not talk about the fact that July is now over. Let's also not mention that I actually made these cupcakes in July, thinking that I was going to have them submitted on time. Let's just enjoy cupcakes. And if you're really into melon cupcakes, you can check out the other 21 melon cupcakes that actually had their ducks in a row and got things posted in the right month.

I tweaked a recipe from 100 Best Cupcakes Recipes, which I picked up at Barnes & Nobel a while back. This book's got a number if interesting looking cupcake recipes, but it didn't have a cantaloupe cupcake. So I tweaked the Banana Cupcake recipe (page 16).

For the cupcakes:

2 cups flour
1 1/2 cups sugar
2 T packed brown sugar
2 t baking powder
1/2 t salt
1/2 cup vegetable oil
2 eggs
1/4 cup milk
1 t vanilla
abt 1 cup pureed cantaloupe (abt 1/3 of a medium cantaloupe)

Preheat oven to 350F. Line 18 muffin cups with paper. Combine flour, sugars, baking powder, and salt in a large bowl. Add oil, egg, milk, and vanilla; beat with electric mixer at medium speed 2 minutes or until well blended. Beat in cantaloupe. Spoon into prepared cupcake papers, filling 3/4 full. Bake for 25-30 min (20-23 for dark pans) or until toothpick comes out clean. Cool completely.

For the frosting:

For the Buttercream
1 cup sugar
4 large egg whites
3 sticks (12 ounces) unsalted butter, at room temperature
¼ cup fresh lemon juice (from 2 large lemons)
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

To Make the Buttercream
Put the sugar and egg whites in a mixer bowl or another large heatproof bowl, fit the bowl over a plan of simmering water and whisk constantly, keeping the mixture over the heat, until it feels hot to the touch, about 3 minutes.
The sugar should be dissolved, and the mixture will look like shiny marshmallow cream.
Remove the bowl from the heat.
Working with the whisk attachment or with a hand mixer, beat the meringue on medium speed until it is cool, about 5 minutes.
Switch to the paddle attachment if you have one, and add the butter a stick at a time, beating until smooth.
Once all the butter is in, beat in the buttercream on medium-high speed until it is thick and very smooth, 6-10 minutes.
During this time the buttercream may curdle or separate – just keep beating and it will come together again.
On medium speed, gradually beat in the lemon juice, waiting until each addition is absorbed before adding more, and then the vanilla.
You should have a shiny smooth, velvety, pristine white buttercream.

(This is the same buttercream recipe as the Perfect Party Cake the Daring Bakers made several months ago. Yum.)

Melting Snowman Cupcakes

We've had the winter that just won't quit here, and so after pondering what to do with the marshmallows, I came up with the idea of melting some snowmen. At the beginning of the month this seemed like mostly wishful thinking: we still had 2-3 feet of snow in the front, and were getting more at pretty regular intervals. I was a little cabin crazy, to say the least.

I started out with yer basic chocolate cupcake recipe (it was also the base for the Maple-Chocolate Cupcakes last month), and I really didn't mess with it too much, just substituted peanut butter for the butter it calls for. I scaled the recipe to make, but really it makes about 12.

Chocolate Peanut Butter Cupcakes

* 2/3 cup all-purpose flour
* 1/8 tsp baking soda
* 1 tsp baking powder
* 1/4 cup and 2 T unsweetened cocoa powder
* 1/8 tsp salt
* 1 T and 1-1/2 tsp creamy peanut butter
* 3/4 cup white sugar
* 1 eggs
* 1 tsp double-proof vanilla extract
* 1/2 cup (whole) milk

Preheat to 350F. Mix together dry ingredients, set aside. Cream sugar and peanut butter. (This takes a little longer than creaming butter, but it did work.) Add egg. If you double the recipe, add them one at a time. Mix well, then beat in the vanilla. Add flour mixture alternately with the milk. Fill cupcake papers 1/2 full. I went a bit shallow on the cupcakes because the "frosting" can't help but be bulky. This means you'll have to watch them closely at the end of the baking time as they may be done early. Bake 14-16 minutes. There should be some empty space at the top of your papers, so let them cool a bit in the pan rather than dumping them out. Once they are cool enough to handle without burning yourself, pull them out of the pan with your fingers so the papers don't get crushed. Take a sharp knife and
"core" the cupcakes, cutting a hollow in the tops. Any tops that you don't eat put in a bowl to use in the next step.




Dirty Snow Topping

Abt 1/3 package Peanut Butter Double-stuff Oreos
About 1 cup vanilla pudding
About 1/3+ package Cool Whip
Tops cut out of the cupcakes

Making this stuff is not an exact science, and because I use bulk pudding, it's hard to know how many packages of that would be equivalent to what I used. The trick to balance the crumbs and the pudding-stuff to get a texture and look that pleases. Mix together the Cool Whip and pudding. In another bowl, take your cookies and your cupcake tops and smash them to smithereens. I used my pastry blender and it worked like a charm. It should look like dirt when you're done. (After all, this is Dirt Cake we're making here, just not arranged so prettily as it usually is.) Fold the crumbs into the pudding. I started with about 1/2 the package of cookies and got to the desired consistency/look at about 2/3 of the package, but I doubled the cupcake recipe since I was giving cupcakes to 2 families this time. You want it to look like that melted snow mess at the end of the driveway in the spring, so don't quite mix in the crumbs completely. There should be some that are still dry enough to look like dirt, but it's also got to stick together well enough to stay on the cupcakes.

Melted Snowmen

3 Mini marshmallows for each cupcake
round toothpicks
empty granola box

First, make a marshmallow melting apparatus: Stab a toothpick through the side of a granola box or whatever you have handy. Jello boxes were too tough: they broke the toothpick. My Sunbelt granola box worked handily, but obviously it doesn't matter. You just need to be able to stand a toothpick up on end in the microwave.



Spear 3 marshmallows & stand it up on your box. Microwave for 5-10 seconds. Watch carefully, and stop as soon as they start puffing; they're plenty warm enough to "melt" by then. I usually stopped at about 5 seconds, but it just worked better to put 10 seconds on the clock each time. (Don't just let these things go, as I've heard that they explode when nuked too long. Don't say I didn't warn ya!) Pull the toothpick out and stab it into the cupcake, pushing it down enough to sort of compress the marshmallows to give them a "melted" look.

Ideas Anyone?

The Cupcake Hero theme this month is marshmallows. I'm drawing a bit of a blank on creative ways to use marshmallows in a cupcake. Any good ideas out there?

Maple-Chocolate Cupcakes

Well, this recipe at All Recipes says that it makes 12 cupcakes. At least, it did after I scaled it to be 12 cupcakes. I'm working on loosing weight here, I don't really want any extra cupcakes. And the website did the math for me, although it did leave me with some mighty odd measurements. But the whole 12 cupcakes thing? It lies. I got 16 cupcakes anyway.

So, here's what I did.

For the Cupcakes:
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1-1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 cup and 1 tablespoon unsweetened cocoa powder
1/8 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons and 3/4 teaspoon butter, softened
1 cup and 2 tablespoons white sugar
1 egg
1/2 cup pure maple syrup
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
3/4 cup milk

Preheat oven to 350F. Line a cupcake pan. Sift together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, cocoa and salt. Set aside.

In a large bowl, cream together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well with each addition, then stir in the vanilla and maple syrup. Add the flour mixture alternately with the milk; beat well. Fill the cupcakes cups 2/3 full.

Bake for 15 to 17 minutes in the preheated oven, or until a toothpick inserted into the cake comes out clean. Leave in the pan for 3-5 min, then dump out onto cooling rack. They're really good just plain, but the chocolate is a much stronger flavor than the maple, and I was a bit disappointed in that. So I got to playing with the frosting.



For the frosting:

I didn't have time to make frosting, and I did have a tub of cream cheese frosting, which is Andy's favorite. So I started with that. Then I added somewhere around 1/2-3/4 cup of pure maple syrup, till the flavor reminded me a little bit of a pancake. It was runnier than I like, so I got out the powdered sugar and added enough to stiffen it up back to a nice spreading consistency. It was a fair amount, but I just dumped it in, so I have no idea how much it was.



They looked a little plain, so I dressed them up with some red sugar. I tried to be all fancy with it and only paint half the cupcake with the sugar, like I've seen some of the other cupcake people do, but it didn't turn out, so I just put sugar on the whole top. It turned out nice. Then I arranged them into a 1 because it's for Cupcake Hero's Project Baby. Except that I see that I did the one backwards. That would explain why every time I looked at it I thought "there's something wrong with this." But I never did figure out what exactly it was... until just now.

Peanut Butter Day!

Today is our first fun holiday of the year - Peanut Butter Day! And of course the best way to celebrate that sort of day is in the kitchen! Happily, a friend of mine just got his yellow belt in Tae Kwon Do, so I'm making cupcakes and we'll give some of them to him, so as not to mess up my weight loss efforts too much.

I googled peanut butter cupcakes to see what I could come up with, and found this recipe. Sounds tasty, but it's missing a couple of things. For instance, the directions say to add sugar to the filling, but there's no sugar listed in the filling's ingredients. Also, there's no baking instructions. But I tried it anyway. Balling up the filling and baking it right into the cupcake sounds very interesting! Here's what I did:

Filling:
1 T butter
1 T milk (I don't have the heavy cream it called for)
1 oz milk chocolate, grated (used my cheese grater & my food scale)
1/4 c creamy peanut butter
abt 1/2 c powdered sugar.

Have the chocolate grated before you start. Melt the butter & bring milk & butter to a boil. Add chocolate. Stir till smooth. Add peanut butter. Stir till smooth. Add powdered sugar a little at a time till the stuff starts pulling away from the sides of the pan when stirred with a whisk. Very scientific, I know. But that's how I did it. At one point I had a little too much powdered sugar, so I added a little slosh of milk. But make sure that if you do that it's a little slosh or you'll get all runny. Chill for about 40 minutes. Or long enough to post about it and move the wash and maybe sweep the kitchen (if the Boy sleeps that long).

6 (1 oz.) squares semi-sweet chocolate
6 tbsp. butter
2 lg. eggs
2/3 c. sugar
1 tsp. vanilla
3/4 c. unsifted flour
1/4 tsp. baking soda
1/4 tsp. salt

Melt the chocolate and butter together. If you have a double boiler, that's what the original recipe says to use. But I don't have that particular toy, so I just grated and chopped the chocolate and then melted them over low heat in a glass pan until they were smooth. In another bowl beat eggs until foamy. Add sugar and vanilla and mix till cream well. Stir in chocolate mixture. Cream some more. Add dry ingredients and stir until incorporated.

Now is the part where things get really interesting because the original recipe ends here. So I guessed, and, as it turned out, I didn't guess very well. I put the chocolate batter into 12 cups and rolled the peanut butter stuff up into balls and set it into the cupcakes.



It was looking very tasty, and I was anticipating something like brownies, since the batter was so wet. But I baked it for about 17 min at 350 - until a toothpick came out clean - and then pulled them out of the oven. Bad things started happening. The cupcakes split and fell. And they were clearly still all sorts of raw in the middle, so I put them back into the oven for another few minutes. The tops were over cooked, and the bottoms very chewy. I think that if I try this recipe again I'll try cooking it for a long time on 300 or something low like that. Anyway, that's my best guess as to what went so horribly wrong with the poor cupcakes! I'd love to hear any suggestions for what might help these: the flavor in the chewy part was very good, and the peanut butter stuff has real promise, if I could just get the cupcakes to cook up a bit nicer.




For the rest of Peanut Butter Day we had peanut butter on a spoon for a snack and sang a Rafi song about peanut butter.

"Peanut butter sandwich made with jam!
One for me and one for David Amram,
A peanut butter sandwich made with jam!
Yum yum yummy yum yum!

"I can think of witches good and bad.
But the best witch that I ever had
Was a peanut butter sandwich made with jam!
Stick stick sticky stick stick!
Yum yum yummy yum yum!"

Looks Tasty

So, I was looking for a recipe for peanut butter filling because I thought that it would go well in a chocolate cupcake. Apparently I'm not the only one to have ever thought that sort of thought because I found a delicious-looking recipe. I probably won't use dark chocolate because Andy doesn't like that stuff, but it sounds just tasty!

Cupcakes!

Well, I found this fun cupcake thing, where they've got a themed ingredient and you build a cupcake around it. Well, the deadline was Dec. 31, and I didn't browse across it until Dec. 30, so there was no way that I was going to be able to get any done in time to enter their contest. But it seemed like such a fun idea. The theme was mint, and I had a bunch of leftover pepperMINT candy canes, so I thought I'd make peppermint vanilla cupcakes.

I used a recipe that a previous winner liked for vanilla cupcakes. But I tweaked it a bit to add a bit of peppermint flavor. That and I don't have all the tools & equipment that the recipe calls for. But here's what I did.

For the cupcake:
1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1 cup sugar
1/2 T baking powder
1/4 t, heaping, salt
1/2 cup salted butter
2 extra large eggs
1/2 c 2% milk
1 t double proof vanilla extract
1 t peppermint extract

preheat to 325, line cupcake pan with papers. Combine flour, sugar, baking powder & salt in a large bowl, mix with fork. Add butter, cut with pastry blender until it's large crumbs, well coated with flour mixture. measure milk, add eggs, vanilla & flavorings to the measuring cup & stir. Pour into four mixture & beat on med-low until ingredients are incorporated. Don't overbeat. Fill 12 cupcake papers till something that resembles 2/3 full. (The other recipe says this should make 15, but I only got 12 & they're nice sized.) Bake, rotating pan halfway through, for 17-20 min, remove to a cooling rack.

While those were cooling I made up some pudding, using the pie filling directions. Nothing fancy here, just stuff I had on hand. After all, it was 10:30pm! When the pudding was made I got out my melon baller & cut the tops out with the big side then hollowed things out a bit with the small side. Then I scooped a bit of that pudding into the holes & put the tops back on.

Next, I needed some frosting. So I made up a batch of buttercream & put some peppermint flavoring in it.

Frosting:
1/2 c crisco
1/2 c butter
1 t double proof vanilla
1 t peppermint flavoring
4 c (aprox 1 lb) powdered sugar
2 T milk
2 candy canes, crushed

Cream butter and shortening with electric mixer. Add vanilla & peppermint extracts. Gradually add sugar mixing well & scraping sides & bottom of the bowel regularly. Icing will look dry. Add milk & beat at high speed until light & fluffy. Crush peppermint sticks in flat-bottomed glass bowl with the bottom of a glass cup until it's pretty fine pieces. Add to the frosting & mix again. Frost the cupcakes.