Sunday Zest

I can only clean my home so many times in a long weekend before even I have overdone it. My husband was out of town this weekend so by the time Sunday afternoon came around I was ready to bake! On today's menu were chocolate cupcakes (yes, again) with a lemon zest icing. My plan was to use the 1M and 104 tips to create the flowers on the two cakes below from my Surprise-Inside book:

Unfortunately, as you can tell from the first picture, that is not a cupcake. The last time I used this chocolate cake recipe there was enough batter for 18 cupcakes and two mini-cakes. This time I halved the recipe thinking the measurements were all easy enough to divide up, so what could go wrong?!

As it turns out, it somewhat ruins the recipe. While the cupcakes tasted delicious, they looked pretty awful. They didn't rise nearly enough and I refuse to show anyone how pathetic they were when they came out of the oven. Lesson learned: do not halve this recipe. I will, however, continue to use the full recipe because it creates an amazingly delicious/heavy/rich cake. If you are interested in creating your own piece of chocolate heaven, search for One Bowl Chocolate Cake III by 'shirleyo' on allrecipes.com. It ends up being a very thin batter after you add a cup of boiling water and makes you question if you followed the recipe correctly, but the consistency is what creates the very dense texture.

Luckily, I had just enough batter left over that I filled two of the mini-cake pans when I put the cupcakes in the oven. Since my husband would be coming home from his trip that evening, I thought it would be a nice surprise to have a personal cake waiting for him after a long day of traveling. Un-luckily, it was the same batter so the two cakes didn't rise enough but they were still manageable for this purpose. 

I filled the bottom layer with the lemon zest icing and sprinkled mini chocolate chips in the middle for the surprise inside. Next, I piped a layer of icing around the edge to sit between the two layers.

After filling the inside of the top layer with icing, I assembled the two cakes and used my 1M tip to pipe a rosette style topping.
 

I think it sort of looks like a massive macaroon. 

 

I ended up doing something I shouldn't have done and knew it before I even started. The top didn't look just right to me, so I scraped off the icing and attempted to do better. I ended up doing worse and should have fought off my OCD more than I did. I knew I wasn't going to do better but I am still learning when to leave well enough alone (it's really a life lesson, not just for baking). The end result still looked nice but after looking back through pictures I realized I should have just stuck with the first attempt.

As you can see, there are still no cupcakes in this post. I did decorate them for practice and tried very hard to decorate one in particular for a co-worker's birthday, but the rest will go in the trash. I would much rather discard the unacceptable's instead of tempting my will power if I can't (won't) give them away. 

There is still a sewing project in the works, so check back soon!

Happy Monday!

Expect the Unexpected

As I get more into baking, I can only be thankful for my family graciously enabling me in my new hobby. Not only did I get two sets of baking pans for my birthday, I also received a gift card to Michaels to let my imagination run wild in the baking aisle. One item in particular has continued to catch my eye whenever I am in Michaels: the Wilton "professional" decorating tip kit. I have a few decorating tips already and could continue to buy each one I want for another $.99-$2.99 a piece, but this kit just makes so much more sense. While it provides an almost unfathomable amount of creativity (at least to me) for the true professionals out there or amateurs like myself, this bad boy runs $50! That's a lot of money for a newbie with lofty goals to spend. Lucky for me, Michaels frequently posts coupons online and I found a 50% off one item before I hit the register.  I know it might seem like I'm talking this kit up a little too much, but I guess for someone who gets pretty dang excited over different icing techniques, finding this is like finding the holy grail.

So after purchasing this kit, I obviously returned home with the notion that I need to practice with as many of the tips as I can in one day. It also occurred to me that even though I may be working on another sewing project on the side, I haven't actually blogged in almost two months. Life has been a little busy in the last month or so but if I can't find time to bake some sweets for the hubby and co-workers I am doing something wrong. 

What's the best way to practice as many different styles of icing as I can at once? Cupcakes! I suddenly remembered I had forgotten, luckily, about the pack of Oreos I purchased a week ago after hiding them in the very top of the cabinet. So my sweet tooth took over and I set out to make chocolate-oreo cupcakes with a cream cheese frosting.

I made chocolate cake batter for what is unfortunately the very first time from scratch, making sure to add just a little more cocoa than what the recipe called for. After filling the cupcake pan, I realized I had far more batter than anticipated and decided to also use one of my new pan sets I received for my birthday. These pans are pretty exciting to me because they create space in the middle of the pan to add other sweets or "surprises" of your choice without having to go through all of the work I have in the past. Even better, they're smaller and allow for some flavor creativity and personalization.

While the 16 cupcakes and four mini-cakes were baking and cooling, I whipped up a batch of cream cheese frosting, which I must say turned out amazingly! I'm not usually a fan of cream cheese frosting but thought it might go along pretty well with the Oreos and the chocolate; a buttercream icing just didn't seem to fit with this combination.

Now to the whole point of this little adventure: the decorating! After filling three icing bags with different decorating tips, I anxiously started out on my "practicing".  I could lie and say that they ended up exactly like I had imagined but I have to tell you, it was such a failure! The consistency of the frosting made it all blend together in one lifeless blob instead of holding the beautiful shape it was supposed to make with my brand new tips! In the past, my OCD would lead me to scraping off the frosting and starting over but my patience was already wearing thin after how quickly my excitement died off.  Luckily, simply placing an Oreo on top made the whole thing look intentional, at least I thought so, and I called it good. 

After my defeat in the Battle of Cupcakes, I looked to the mini cakes with a hope for inspiration. I have been craving strawberry shortcake lately and decided that was a good place to start but with the obvious chocolate twist. I filled the inside of one cake layer with a little bit of icing and filled it the rest of the way with sliced strawberries. Then I filled the "top" half of the cake with icing and placed it on top of the other layer, hollow side down. After again trying to decorate the top of the cake with the new icing tips and once again failing, I sliced up more strawberries and placed them around the top in what I would like to think was an artistic method. 

 

Pretty, huh?!

I had two more layers left and unfortunately my husband doesn't like fruit, so I gladly returned to the remainder of the Oreos to complete his cake and eliminate the option of me eating any more of those delicious devil cookies. I repeated the same process of filling the inside of the cake layers with icing but then used crushed Oreos for the surprise inside.  Again, of course I attempted to decorate the top of the cake but failed even worse than before, resulting in icing falling all over the sides and me having to keep the process going in the direction it was already choosing to. I coated the entire outside of the cake with icing and topped it off with more crushed Oreos. I have to say, I ultimately really liked the way the two cake's colors complimented each other.

I have so far only taste-tested the strawberry cake but it was delicious!!! Even though I completely failed at what I initially set out to do and must now sacrifice my diet to "practice" decorating again later on this week, I was so pleased by the end result of the surprise-inside cakes.

 

Moral of the story: just start baking and see where you end up. I can almost guarantee you have plenty of people to eat your baking failures, too. 

Enjoy!