Birthday Cupcakes

I made myself some birthday cupcakes this past weekend. Maybe making your own birthday cake is not your idea of a good time. It sure is mine. It was my pleasure to make cupcakes for my special day and to share with my friends, being addicted to baking and all.

I made orange-scented chocolate cupcakes. I had intended them to be dark chocolate, but in the end they just tasted like chocolate - and orange of course.

I really wanted to taste the orange so I used both orange extract and fresh orange zest and juice. There are many things I will do differently if I ever make these cupcakes again. One thing I'll cut out is the extract. It gives the cake a bit of an artificial taste. I used the extract in the cake, in the frosting and in the bark adorning each cupcake. It worked well in the bark, pretty well in the cake, but not so well in the frosting. I decided to use the extract in the frosting instead of the zest because I didn't want pieces of zest in my teeth. I think that is a risk worth taking to get that natural orange flavor.

My cake was a dark chocolate cake recipe made with some strong coffee to compliment the chocolate. The last time I made this cake it was darker. The recipe calls for dark chocolate chips which I omitted this time. Maybe they make a bigger difference than I thought. I also added a teaspoon of orange zest and a teaspoon of orange extract. As far as the orange flavor goes, it worked like I wanted it to. It was definitely an orange-scented chocolate cake and not overpowered by orange flavor. I added the orange flavoring right after adding the eggs to the creamed butter and sugar.

For the filling I tried a recipe using sweetened condensed milk. I adapted it from a lime flavored filling. I added a tablespoon of orange zest and 1/3 cup of fresh orange juice to the milk and put it in the fridge to thicken. Well, it never thickened. I tried to pour it down the middle of my cakes anyway and the cake just soaked it up. Not good. I think I've made this mistake before. To fix the problem I quickly made some whipped cream frosting and mixed it with some of the condensed milk mixture. The flavor was great and the consistency was good, so I piped it into the cakes. Unfortunately, the bottom of the cupcakes were a little mushy from the first filling attempt.

The frosting was a basic chocolate frosting recipe using melted chocolate. I used unsweetened chocolate instead of semi-sweet to get a dark chocolate flavor. It didn't really work. It tasted almost the same as it always does. I added a couple of teaspoons of orange extract. This is where the extract tasted the most artificial. Luckily the fresh zest and juice in the filling made the whole cupcake work better and taste more natural.

When I first thought about making an orange-scented chocolate cupcake I thought about garnishing with candied orange zest. I looked up a few recipes and decided to scrap that idea as I didn't want to put so much work into a garnish. I chose to make an orange dark chocolate almond bark instead. It is so easy. Cover a baking sheet with foil, sprinkle whatever nuts or goodies you want running through the candy, melt your chocolate in a double boiler or in the microwave (be careful not to burn it), mix in any flavoring, and pour over the nuts. Stick it in your fridge until hard and then break into pieces. It looks great and tastes great too. I love when easy things are so impressive.

Will I ever make this cupcake again? Maybe if someone requests it. I do know what I'll do differently the next time.