The Most Perfect Cupcake

This is (far and away) the most perfect cupcake I've ever had. It might even be the most perfect thing I've ever baked. Martha would call it "a good thing." It also represents a baking milestone for me.

First off, it's a banana pecan cupcake. By itself, it's just wonderful. The texture really makes the cake. Right out of the oven, I would say they are the perfect breakfast treat. More of a cake though, than a muffin. What takes these to the next level though is the frosting. Caramel buttercream. Fresh, homemade caramel buttercream. With more caramel drizzled on top. The recipes are both from Martha Stewart's Cupcakes cookbook and are much better than other cupcake recipes out there. The whole book is full of awesome ideas and well written recipes. Every cupcake I've ever produced from that book has been a home run, slam dunk, and touchdown all in one. You need this book.

Now, the baking milestone: I finally (FINALLY) figured out real, authentic buttercream. Like the kind with a meringue base and everything. Buttercream is always a bit of a disaster for me. Either my meringue fails to thicken and form stiff peaks, or it breaks when I add the butter. You name it, it's gone wrong for me. Martha's trick was essential to my success. I usually have trouble telling when the sugar has dissolved in my egg whites while gently heating them over a simmering pot of water. Because I'm never able to see through the foamy mess of egg whites, I usually heat them too much or don't get the sugar dissolved enough. But Martha suggests rubbing some of the mixture between your fingers until the "grittiness" of the sugar ceases. Once this happened, I heated them for a brief second longer, and pulled them off the simmering pot of water. After beating the egg white/sugar solution, I got the most beautiful, fluffy, stable (!) meringue I've ever produced. I quite literally danced around the kitchen. But, it wasn't done! I slowly added the butter portionwise with mixing. All looked well, but then, it looked like it was breaking! I was pretty heartbroken, but followed Martha and beat it into submission. After a few minutes on high with the Kitchen Aid, I had the most silky, smooth buttercream in history. And it only got better once I added the homemade caramel! I think I'm far less intimidated by this now than I used to be. I think I'll be making my own buttercreams for all my cakes from now on. All thanks to this most perfect little cupcake.

Alligator!!!

For some reason I know an unnaturally large number of people who share February 7 as their birthday. For instance, my grandmother Kiki would have been 100 this year (and she wouldn't have let us forget it either if she had lived so long). In addition to Kiki, my boss' little son turned 7 this year (lucky 7!). As it turned out, our annual Super Bowl party also fell on that day. So my boss' son wouldn't feel like a bunch of old graduate students stole his birthday, we decided to sing to him at half time. I volunteered to make cupcakes and turned out 36 of the little treats. As I planned my treats, I realized that I just didn't want to serve up generic cupcakes but wanted to produce something a little kid would love. After one of my exhaustive google searches, I saw a picture of this alligator cupcake "cake" in which 24 cupcakes were arranged and decorated to look like a fierce(ish) alligator. Such imagination! Unfortunately, the book had been checked out of my local library and I was forced to figure it out from the pictures online.

I whipped up 24 vanilla cupcakes and then frosted them with the help of my handy pastry bag with green vanilla frosting to look like they were each covered in lizard scales. Next I bought some Keebler chocolate covered grahams and carefully cut them into little isosceles triangles for the ridges on his back. From a box of Runts candy, I fished out all the yellow banana candies to use as claws. Finally, the teeth and eyes were fashioned out of large marshmallows that I either cut to size and shape, or covered in frosting and m&m's. Lastly I arranged them as shown. In all, it took about 2 hours.

To complete the "cake" I made 12 chocolate cupcakes and topped them with vanilla frosting and silver sugar sprinkles. I melted some semisweet chocolate and used my pastry bag to pipe "Happy Birthday Harry" onto a piece of parchment paper. After a few hours in the fridge, it was hard enough to stand up on the chocolate cupcakes as in the picture below. If you do this, just make sure the chocolate is at least 1/4" thick so it doesn't fall apart.

This was my first cake for such a young kid, but it was fun to do something more whimsical than my usual fare.

Black and White and Cake All Over

It's been a little while now since I baked like a maniac. Fortunately, one of my labmates again gave me a good excuse to destroy my kitchen. We decided to go with 4 dozen cupcakes and a two-tiered cake to match! I was really conflicted over what kind of cake I wanted to do. For some reason I was just stumped. Then, it came to me. My bedroom curtains were the perfect inspiration! I have an eclectic mix of black and white striped and black and white floral curtains in my bedroom that made for what might be my favorite cake yet. I decided to add to the mix of patterns by stacking a round cake on top of a square one.

On the cupcake side of things, I went with 4 different designs to give everyone a good choice. First off were vanilla cake with vanilla buttercream adorned with pearlized silver sprinkles and gold-dusted white chocolate "J" pieces. Second were (my favorite) red velvet cupcakes with cream cheese icing adorned with silver sprinkles and gold-dusted dark chocolate finials (generously gold-dusted by E.!). Also with cream cheese icing were a set of carrot cake cupcakes (easy as pie to make!). Finally, I went with a unique caramel cupcake with a caramel buttercream (E. and I ate all the extra out of my bowl!) and spun sugar abstract decorations on top. All this baking taught me one thing: I need to make cupcakes more often. The most difficult thing: keeping Chris away from all the cupcakes for any appreciable amount of time.

I was very pleased with how it all turned out and even more surprised we got everything to the park in one piece! I had good help with the transport. Hopefully there will be more cupcakes in the future.