Week Eleven: Lots o’ Chocolate and Orange

(The two cupcake recipes this week came from “Cupcakes!” by Elinor Klivans. The cookie recipe came from “The Magnolia Bakery Cookbook” by Jennifer Appel and Allysa Torey.)

This week I found myself playing bachelor girl while my husband Rob is a-hootin’ and a-hollerin’ in Austin, Texas for South by Southwest. This also explains why all my photos in this post were taken with my iPhone – Rob has my real camera in the Lone Star State.

I always get lonely when he’s gone and I find that having a project to do helps to alleviate some of the loneliness. So this time around, I decided to bake.

It began last night with Orange Chiffon Cupcakes with Orange Butter Icing. This was the only recipe of the three that I wasn’t thrilled with. The recipe basically consisted of two batters – one with egg yolks and the other with egg whites. The egg yolk batter turned out fine, but the egg white batter was lacking. I think the problem stemmed from using my KitchenAid stand mixer to beat the egg whites, when I should have used my hand held mixer. They didn’t quite get as fluffy as they were supposed to:

The egg white batter was folded into the egg yolk batter and baked for 35 minutes. They seemed to bake up okay:

When they were finished, I rigged up a soup can/wire rack cooling device, onto which the cupcake pan was flipped upside down:

(Yeah, that one cupcake fell out when I flipped the pan upside down.)

The cupcakes hung upside down for 45 minutes to cool, at which point they were frosted. There was no picture of these cupcakes in the cookbook, so I’m not sure exactly what the icing was supposed to look like. It turned out to be more of a glaze than an icing, but it still tasted pretty good:

Aside from not being quite fluffy enough, my problem with this recipe was that the author said it would make 12 big cupcakes. I was supposed to pour the batter into muffin pans to get a big ‘ol cupcake. I thought I was using a muffin pan, but when I compared it with my cupcake pan, they were the same size…and the recipe still only made seven cupcakes. I’m guessing the egg white batter should have been a lot fluffier and that would have increased the volume of batter. Oh well, lessons learned.

This morning I got up early to take our dog Scout in for her vet appointment, so I used the morning to get started on my second recipe – Chocolate Covered Hi Hat cupcakes. This was a fairly ambitious recipe, as the finished product was supposed to look like this:

The recipe started with a fairly simple sour cream chocolate cupcake recipe (and man are these cupcakes good), which was easy enough until I tried to remove the cupcakes from the pans:

(Yup, that’s my thumbprint in the upper right hand cupcake. Whoopsie!)

While the cupcakes cooled (during which time I had to make a grocery store run for more sugar), I started making the topping. The topping consisted of sugar, water, egg whites and cream of tartar. This was combined in a bowl and placed over a pot of simmering water and mixed with a hand held mixer for 12 minutes. Twelve minutes doesn’t sound like such a long time, until you get to about minute six. Carpal Tunnel Syndrome sets in pretty quickly:

After the 12 minutes were up, vanilla and almond extracts were mixed in, the topping was spooned into a pastry bag/freezer bag and piped onto the cupcakes:

I didn’t pipe quite as much topping onto the cupcakes as the author of the cookbook did, just because I was scared that I would mess something up. I went a little more conservative. The topped cupcakes were then refrigerated while I melted the chocolate for the coating:

Then the messy part began. I turned each cupcake upside down and dunked it in the melted chocolate. I then spooned more chocolate over the cupcakes until all the topping was covered with a layer of chocolate:

The coated cupcakes were then tucked back in the fridge for two and a half hours to firm up:

I decided to eat the mutated cupcake (like a good baker does) so I could take the pretty ones to work. I cut it in half too see if the cross section looked anything like the photo in the cookbook. Surprisingly, it did!

The cake part of this concoction is fantastic. I’m not the biggest fan of the topping. The sugar didn’t completely dissolve, so it’s slightly gritty (although not nasty or anything). I’m not sure what else I could have done to dissolve the sugar, because if mixing it for 12 minutes doesn’t do it, I’m not sure what does. Also, I’m apparently not an almond fan. I really could have done with the almond extract.

I finished up with the recipe that I originally thought was going to be the only thing I made today: Orange White Chocolate Chip Cookies. This was a pretty straightforward chocolate chip cookie dough with orange zest and white chocolate chips added:

The dough was dropped by rounded teaspoonful on a baking sheet and baked for 11 minutes. It turned out the cutest little bite-sized cookies!

Whew! This was a marathon baking experience! I just hope my co-workers enjoy all the goodies coming in tomorrow!

Things learned today: I need a wire rack with the wires going in both directions. My current rack has only horizontal wires and they sometimes leave indentations on the undersides of my baked goods. Also, I need a microplane. My box grater is a nightmare to use to zest fruit.

Depending on my mood, I may bake some Alphabet Cookies for an event at work on Friday for the Week Twelve project. But they won’t be cut in alphabet shapes!