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!