Week Sixteen: Raspberry Cupcakes with Framboise Frosting

This week I once again cobbled a couple of recipes together from the Internet. This is the Raspberry Cupcake recipe. And this is the buttercream frosting that I tweaked a little with Framboise.

Let me start off by saying that I LOVE Framboise. It is quite possibly the most perfect alcohol ever created. I am not a beer fan, but there’s something about that raspberry flavored goodness. Mix it with some ice and ginger ale, and I am a happy woman.

So I got really excited thinking about how I could incorporate Framboise into frosting. I couldn’t find an established recipe for it online, so I just went with a buttercream frosting and winged it. The cupcake part was pretty easy. I found a raspberry cupcake recipe online and followed it. The recipe began by combining cake flour, all-purpose flour, baking powder and salt, and then adding two sticks of butter that have been cut into one inch cubes:

Now that I’ve made these, if I ever make them again, I will know to cut the butter even smaller. Basically when you’re finished with the batter, you end up with chunks of butter (because you don’t cream it prior to mixing it into the flour). The chunks of butter melt into the cupcake, which is nice, but it’s kind of messy. The cups on my cupcake tin had a layer of butter in the bottom even though I baked the cupcakes in papers. Surprisingly, they’re not the least bit soggy, but they are quite delicate.

Once the butter was mixed into the flour mixture just until the butter was coated, milk, eggs, raspberry yogurt and vanilla extract were whisked together in a bowl:

(I feel like this would make an AWESOME batter for French Toast. Note to self: Try this sometime.)

This mixture was added to the flour/butter mixture in three parts. Once it was just incorporated, a little over a cup of fresh raspberries were added, and the mixture was poured into cupcake cups:

These were baked for 25 minutes, during which time I started on the Framboise Frosting. This was a pretty standard buttercream frosting recipe, which included one softened stick of butter which was creamed in the mixer. A cup of powdered sugar was added in until it was creamy. At this point, I changed the recipe up a bit. I added vanilla extract, milk and the Framboise. Once this was incorporated, I added more and more powdered sugar until it resembled frosting:

I loaded up a pastry bag and star tip with the frosting and went to work:

Alas, my frosting wasn’t quite thick enough. I added so much powdered sugar to that mixture, and it never really got any thicker than this. So a lot of my cupcakes have frosting dripping over the edge. It’s all good though. I popped those babies in the fridge and the frosting hardened up on the spot. So no more gooey mess. That frosting tastes AMAZING though. I almost made myself sick eating it. I just. Couldn’t. Stop.
These cupcakes are pretty good. I only had two (one tester to make sure they were baked all the way through and another with the frosting). I am still not the biggest fan of berries. I somehow ALWAYS manage to take a bite and crunch a seed right in my teeth. It’s a very unsettling feeling eating something soft and then crunching a seed. I’m the only person I know with this issue. I’m sure my co-workers will devour them:

Next week I’ll be baking on Thursday morning. Rob and I are driving to New Jersey Friday for a friend’s wedding over the weekend and I plan to bake something cookie-ish that we can eat in the car. I’m not sure yet what it will be. I will have to do some research and pour over my cookbooks to find the most suitable item!