Dreaming

I've been dreaming about starting up my cupcake business again. Would it be delivery, an etsy shop, a store front bakery, a food truck, a cupcake stand, a cupcake cart? I keep thinking that it would be such a shame not to open a business when my product is sooooooooooooooo good. Yes, I am tooting my own horn.

Just now is not quite the right time, but some day. Until then I'll keep experimenting, perfecting recipes and blogging. It's so fun to dream and research and plan and bake!! Here are some of my most recent trials. I tweaked each recipe to my own liking, of course, but the gist of each recipe came form the links below (pics are of my goodies).

Chocolate Chocolate Chip Zucchini Cupcakes from I Am Baker

Cranberry Chai Cupcakes from BHG

Orange Cardamom Rose Cupcakes from Hostess with the Mostess

Butterfinger Cupcakes from Confessions of a Cookbook Queen

They were all fabulous. I make a mean cupcake, that's true, but I can also pick out a mean recipe. With the training of my palate has come a training of the eye and I can spot a great recipe, idea or flavor pairing a mile away. I've proven this statement wrong, by the way, just a few times. Hee, hee.

The best thing about dreaming is that all the hard work, long hours, stress, financial strain, etc. are not part of my experience - just the fun stuff. ;)

Jar It

I recently made cupcakes for my mother-in-law's 80th birthday party - Cinnamon Mocha and Cherry Crisp. I had left over frosting and leftover chocolate cake in the freezer; and you know how I love to use up all my leftovers in scrumptious ways.

I took a few jars down form my windowsill (I am also an avid jar collector - a jar can't hardly get passed me) and made cupcake parfaits using my leftover ingredients.

On the left is chocolate cake with cinnamon coffee buttercream and cinnamon brown sugar oat crumble. On the right is chocolate cake with cherry buttercream and cherry preserves. Yummy, yummy (my favorite word).

They were so nice to eat with a spoon - way less mess. About two cupcakes fit in these particular jars so I didn't have to go back into the kitchen to get another cupcake. Maybe I'll do the jar thing more often. What a beautiful and scrumptious mess.

Sourdough Cupcakes! What?

I know I said that I would try to limit my non-cupcake escapades. This week's blog entry is part cupcake and part something else truly wonderful.

Last month I started my own sourdough starter. This is when you mix together a certain amount of flour and water and feed it twice a day (discarding some of the starter, and adding in more flour and water) for at least a month. This cultivates the natural yeast in the air for making bread (and other goodies) without having to buy yeast.

I've been making bread for several months now and was excited about the prospect of not having to buy yeast anymore. Little did I know that I was walking into a wonderful world where my sourdough starter could serve as the base for breads, pancakes, waffles, pizza dough, muffins, and yes, you guessed it, cupcakes. Yippee!

I found a recipe at King Arthur Flour for chocolate sourdough cake and modified it to make beautiful, rich, chocolatey cupcakes. The cupcakes do not taste sour or bready in any way. Also, they rose beautifully. Thank you my little natural yeast friends.

I used these cakes for a baby shower where I filled them with eggless cookie dough, frosted them with peanut butter frosting, and drizzled salted caramel on top. They were scrumptious - too scrumptious.

I've also used the starter to make English muffins - which also turned out yummy.

For Easter I'm planning on using my starter to make carrot cake cupcakes based on another online recipe that is supposed to be super moist and super yummy. How many times can a person use the word "yummy" in one blog post? I' haven't come anywhere near my limit yet. Hee, hee.

I still use my starter mainly for bread. I bake two loaves of sourdough every other week. My starter is still in it's baby stage, so I am keeping it on the kitchen counter and continuing to feed it twice a day. I am looking forward to transitioning the starter into my refrigerator where I'll only need to feed it once a week or so. Until then, I've got three little ones in the house to take care of. ;)

If you are interested in starting your own sourdough starter, here is the website I used as a jumping off point: http://www.culturesforhealth.com/how-to-obtain-sourdough-starter.

Use It Up

This post is once again not about cupcakes. I'll try not to make this the norm, but I haven't been baking cupcakes as much as I've been baking everything else under the sun. This week my boys and I cut out heart cookies out of store-bought gingerbread dough and decorated them with royal icing for Valentine's Day. This was my first time using royal icing. It's fun.

Royal icing is the kind used on cookies because it dries hard allowing you to stack and pack cookies without smudging. There are at least two ways you can make this kind of icing. You can use egg whites or meringue powder (for those of us that are a little nervous about raw eggs). Here is Martha's recipe.

We had a bunch of icing left over even though the boys piled mountains of it on top of their cookies. I decided to make some frosted oatmeal raisin cookies for my husband. Oatmeal cookies are one of his favorites; I think, in part, because the oats give the cookies a little more nutrition than other cookies. On that note, I recently learned that rolled oats are more nutritious than quick oats (I guess that's pretty logical, like whole wheat flour has more nutrition than white flour - less processed). Anyway, unless the recipes you use call for quick oats, I recommend using rolled oats instead. If you have a store near you that sells grains in bulk, they are usually 99 cents a pound, and sometimes on sale for less.

I actually used quick oats for this batch of cookies as I had a container full that I needed to use up. As it happens, the whole reason I made the cookies was to use up the royal icing. If you couldn't tell already, I love using things up. I get a lot of satisfaction out of using up ingredients and leftovers; and using up two things at once in a recipe is even more satisfying. Without further ado, here at last is a pic of my oatmeal raisin cookies, drizzled with royal icing.

I used a basic oatmeal cookie recipe from BHG with my own tweaks. Click here for the recipe on the BHG site. I scoop them with a 1/4 cup measuring scoop to make big cookies. I like big cookies because you don't have to keep going back to the cookie jar... and you get through baking your dough quicker. I love that! If you scoop them big, they will take 12 to 14 minutes to cook.

Not About Cake

I recently started doing some grocery shopping at the 99 cents store. We are tightening our belts around here. Last week they had perfect blackberries and I put myself in a blackberry pie kinda mood. While it is not the cheapest pie to make, it makes a big difference when you spend 99 cents instead of $2.98 or more on 6 oz packs of blackberries.

I used my favorite crust recipe, which I will keep a secret for now, and looked up recipes for the filling. I found a few similar versions that got really high ratings that mixed between 4 and 6 cups blackberries with sugar, cornstarch and a little lemon juice. I should have looked further. I used one of said recipes and ended up with a beautiful tasty pie containing a lake of juice inside.

My hubby came home and caught me with a straw in the pie, sucking out juice and spitting it into the sink. I know, not a pretty picture. The pie was still yummy - plump blackberries and perfectly thick buttery crust. I was surprised to find that my crust did not end up soogy. Maybe I got the juice out in time. Next time, however, I'll cook down my filling first.

The pie ended up costing about $6 or $7. My husband commented that I could have purchased a pie for less. True, true; but it wouldn't have been as good (at least that is what I am claiming), and this one pie can serve as dessert for a whole week. So that works out to about a $1 a day. Except that it only lasted half the week. I won't recalculate.

Breakfast Cake and a Tinsy Rant

As you can imagine cake is a big part of our home life. While I can down a couple of cupcakes per day on a regular basis, my hubby is more of an ice cream kinda guy. He does, however, love quick breads and muffins (a.k.a. breakfast cake) with his mid-morning coffee. It's funny, as much as I love cake, I don't really go for muffins and quick breads. Maybe it's the lack of frosting. I love making them though and my husband and little guys love eating them.

Earlier this week my hubby requested something a bit more healthy. It is a new year after all. Might as well attempt a change in diet. I baked up a couple of loaves of zucchini bread with a simple toasted almond crumble on top.

I love recipes that make double loaves; one for now and one for the freezer that I can pull out when I have company over or an event I need to bring something to. The base recipe for this bread is from Better Homes and Gardens. You're supposed to wait 10 minutes before removing the bread from the pans. I would wait more like 20. I find that 10 minutes is not long enough for the bread to be cool enough to not stick to the bottom of the loaf pan, leaving a gaping hole at the bottom of your bread (calm down, breath).  Also, keep in mind that zucchini bread slices best when you wrap and refrigerate it overnight.

One thing I'll say about a crumble topping on quick breads; so much falls off turning the bread out of the pan that I wonder each time why I even bother with it. Old habits die hard I guess. Also, quick breads are nothing without a crumble or glaze on top (this girl's opinion).

Here is my version:
3 cups flour
1 Tbsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1 1/2 tsp cinnamon
2 eggs
2 tsp vanilla
1 cup oil
2 cups sugar or brown sugar or a mixture*
1 large or two normal size zucchini (shredded to about 2 1/2 cups)

Crumble Topping:
1/2 cup brown sugar
6 Tbsp flour (or 3 Tbsp flour and 3 Tbsp oats)
4 Tbsp butter, cold
2/3 cup toasted chopped almonds

Mix dry ingredients.
Mix wet ingredients and sugar in a another bowl.
Dump wet into dry and mix all at once just until moist.
Pour into two greased loaf pans.
Mix up crumble ingredients with fingers and sprinkle on top.
Bake at 350 about 55 minutes.
Cool in pans about 20 minutes before removing.
Wrap completely cooled loaves and refrigerate overnight before slicing.

*For a darker bread with a caramel-like flavor use brown sugar.

Wacky Cake

First off, please forgive the pictures in this post. My camera is sporting some sort of digital disease and my photo editing skills are deeply lacking, but I didn't want to leave you with nothing to look at. With that said, we enter a world where chickens are of no use to us. Let me explain.

Running out of eggs last week sent me on a journey through wacky cake land. If you've never heard of it, wacky cake uses baking soda and vinegar for leavening instead of eggs. It's not the best cake in the world, but it's not bad - it certainly does the trick - especially as a vehicle for gobs and gobs of frosting. It's also a great base for a vegan cake.

So last week I had a bunch of ingredients I needed to use up (dulce de leche, chocolate ganache and a cookie crunch topping that fell off of some unsuccessful cookie bars) and no eggs. I remembered wacky cake and looked up a recipe for a simple chocolate version.

I baked it up and after it cooled slathered on a very thick layer of dulce de leche frosting. Then I sprinkled as much of the cookie crumb topping as I could fit on top, drizzled it with more dulce de leche and then drizzled on my left over chocolate ganache. Although impressive looking, the flavor was good, but not spectacular.

This is what was left after I took a fork to half of the cake.

There is something quite happy and fun about taking a fork to a whole cake and just digging in. It's like a lot of things that you think are very important are suddenly thrown out the window and you find yourself smiling about it. Don't take that analogy too far.

This week I got inspired and decided to use up some overripe bananas in another wacky cake recipe. I frosted it with a cinnamon scented peanut butter frosting and topped it with a few banana chips so as not to leave the cake too naked.

I now find myself in a wacky cake frenzy contemplating the endless wacky cake possibilities. If I really think about it, it's the perfect cake for me as I mostly care about frosting anyway and if I ever had to live in a world without chickens, I'd be okay.