Cupcakes!

Alright I went so crazy with making cupcakes on my days off that I honestly didn't want to blog about them I was like...go away cupcakes! But here I am I'm gonna give it a go. So what I did on Thursday was....I made vanilla based cupcake recipe from the book cupcakes! by Elinor Klivans. For the first batch I baked half of it with vanilla (REAL vanilla) and half with pistachio nuts folded in. Then I made the same recipe and added cinnamon to half, and then a mix of spices in the other half and baked them. Then I made some plain chocolate cupcakes from the same book. But as much as I love the recipe I was hoping for a darker chocolate taste. Theeen on Friday I made white chocolate swiss meringue buttercream and vanilla swiss meringue buttercream. I iced the pistachio cupcakes with the white choc buttercream and then the cinnamon with vanilla and covered THAT with cinnamon sugar, the spice cupcakes ALSO with cinnamon sugar cause i'm a moron (it was supposed to be maple. And the vanilla cupcakes with the ...vanilla! (Duh). So it's cool. Oh, and I also got those chili cupcakes to work. TO DIE FOR. I love them. So yeah. That's about right. I think that's all I did. (Hah...that's all...gawsh.)

Failure cupcakes...

Alright so I tried to do some Pequin Chili Chocolate cupcakes today....didn't work. They didn't rise, I'm not exactly sure why, and I decided that chili powder was pretty much the same thing as ground Pequin chili's. It's not. By the way. It tastes weird. My uncle likes them...and they don't taste bad...they just taste really weird. Like chili. And chocolate. But I have a feeling that they're supposed to taste like hot chocolate. Not hot as in warm but hot as in spicy. So they dont win. Not sure what I'm going to do to fix it. Perhaps try to find some actual ground chili peppers as opposed to chili powder and add it to a different chocolate cupcake recipe. Booooo. Picture of the failures to come.

First post!

Hi! My name's Lisa and I'm starting this blog because I personally really find cupcake blogs suuuper handy, an awesome way to share recipes, and I thought it would be a neat way to document what I'm doing with myself. I'm just starting to bake cupcakes (yay!) for a local cafe in a month or so and so I'm currently experimenting with recipes to provide for them. My goal is to provide recipes that are fun and different, without being too crazy for the general population. Personally I think it's super cool to toss just about anything into a cupcake, but we need these puppies to sell. Hopefully I'll get to do some crazy ones though, just for fun. Oh, and all the icing is going to be...buttercream. Because I have to be able to freeze them. Because this local cafe is actually not reeeally local. It's kind of 3 hours away. But its in the same province so it's local. Goooooo Manitoba!

Anyways, my first recipe! I got 22 small cupcakes.

Walnut cupcakes

1.5 cups unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 1/3 cups granulated sugar
4 large eggs
2 tablespoons maple syrup (the recipe calls for grade A 0r B pure...but I used aunt jemima's)
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup fresh finely ground walnuts (mine were a little less than fine, I like the texture of chunks)
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt

1. Preheat oven to 350. Butter pans blah blah blah

2. Cream butter & sugar till light & fluffy.

3. Add eggs 1 at a time beating well & scraping sides after each addition.

4. Beat in maple syrup, vanilla and ground walnuts.

5. Add the flour, baking powder & salt (sifted) in three batches, preferably folding in each addition but if you're lazy just go for the last one.

6. Stick it into the pans, and bake! The recipe is originally for a layer cake so it calls for 30-35 minutes. I took out my cupcakes at 15 minutes, but they're a teensy bit dry so I suggest taking them out earlier.

Coffee Swiss Meringue Buttercream

4 egg whites
1 cup sugar
1 1/4 cup butter
1 shot espresso (mmmm....)

Whisk the whites and sugar over a hot water bath till the whites are warm and the sugar is dissolved. Put it in your handy dandy KitchenAid and whisk it until it's cooled off and in stiff peaks.

Slowly add in the butter (room temperature, obvi.) and then add the shot of espresso (ROOM TEMP!) because you don't want your icing to melt.

Then ice those puppies!



This recipe is from "in the Sweet Kitchen" by Regan Daley

All in all, it's a good recipe, I looove the icing. I hope it freezes well! Just bake the cupcakes a bit less and you have some preeetty yummy cupcakes on your hands!

Toodles!