I meant to post this yesterday, but it totally slipped my mind. Anyway, this week was kind of my cheat week, as I mentioned last week. I’ve baked these vanilla cupcakes about a million times, and they are my go-tos when I need cupcakes fast. And as I mentioned last week, I was pretty sure I hadn’t made the chocolate cupcakes before, which turned out to be true. They were as easy as the vanillas:

These cupcakes were baked as the blank canvases for children at my work to decorate for Easter and springtime. One of my co-workers also baked some chocolate and vanilla cupcakes. Together we ended up with about ten dozen!

I decorated a few cupcakes beforehand to give the kids ideas:

From left to right, that’s Worms In Dirt, Peep Chick with Eggs and Peep Rabbit with Eggs.

The Worms in Dirt was my favorite. I chopped Chocolate Graham Crackers in my food processor to create dirt:

I frosted the chocolate cupcake with chocolate frosting and then rolled it around in the ‘dirt’. A gummy worm was added. I tried to make a little grass with green frosting, but it didn’t work out so well:

The kids also had the option of just dumping tons of candy on their cupcakes, which seemed to be the most popular choice. Unfortunately, I couldn’t take any photos.

Sorry this week’s entry is so short. But stayed tuned this weekend when I attempt to make cream puffs for Easter. And hopefully the blog entry will be super-exciting.

This week I planned to bake the Chocolate Marbled Brioche Bread from Nick Malgieri’s “The Modern Baker”. The recipe seemed fairly straightforward, although I was skeptical of Malgieri’s use of a food processor to blend all the ingredients. I love my KitchenAid Mixer and would have preferred to use the dough hook. But I was willing to give Malgieri and his newfangled technology a try.

The first step was mixing milk, yeast and flour and letting it sit in a bowl for twenty minutes. It was supposed to have risen a little and gotten ‘bubbly’, but that didn’t really happen. It did seem a touch bigger, but there were no bubbles that I could see. Next, I started mixing butter and eggs in the food processor:

I added in various other things, including lemon zest and rum (!), and pulsed the mixture until it came together. The yeast mixture and some additional flour was added and pulsed. At this point, the dough seemed okay. It was elastic-y and looked like dough I’ve created in the past. The dough was kneaded a bit and then cut into three equal pieces. Two would stay plain:

And one would be mixed with a chocolate enrichment. This may be where I messed up. I melted the chocolate at the beginning of the recipe and then let it cool. Then I mixed water, baking soda and cinnamon together in a bowl and mixed it in with the cooled chocolate. I did this about ten to fifteen minutes before I needed it. When I went to fetch it, the chocolate had hardened up and looked, well, weird. So I popped in the microwave for fifteen seconds just to loosen it up. When I pulled the bowl out of the microwave, the chocolate was puffy…the baking soda had gone to work. But I mixed it back together and dumped it in the food processor with one of the dough pieces. It came out looking okay:

Next, one of the plain pieces of dough was pressed out into a square on a floured cutting board. The chocolate dough was pressed into a square on top of it, and the final plain piece was pressed on top of the chocolate, forming a sandwich of sorts:

The layered dough was then cut into three long strips, and those strips were cut into smaller pieces:

Those pieces were tossed into a bowl and sprinkled with a bit of water:

Next I was instructed to gently squeeze and press those pieces into a cohesive ball. This is where the real trouble started. Those pieces would not all press together. As soon as I got them to stick, they’d start separating. No amount of coaxing would get them to meld into each other. But I pushed them together the best I could, and then put them into a buttered loaf pan. The pan was left to rest for one to two hours, or until the dough had risen one inch over the top of the pan. Well, that never happened. After one hour, nothing. After two hours, nothing. I even moved the pan closer to a heating vent, hoping that the warmth would encourage the dough to rise. So I just went ahead and preheated the oven and threw the bread in:

The bread baked for 35 minutes. It didn’t rise in the oven either. It did turn a lovely golden brown color:

The pieces were still separated. They never joined each other. I wiggled the end of the loaf and one of the chocolate chunks fell out. It’s like each little cut piece baked separately and were only holding onto each other because of the constriction of the pan. I tried to slice the loaf and ended up with this:

Booooo. I was so upset by this one. The bread tastes pretty good, although it’s really dense and has more of a cake consistency than bread. I mean, I’ll eat some of it, but I don’t think this is one to be proud of. I can’t believe that nuking the baking soda was the linchpin to failure. If that was the case, then the plain dough should have risen and the chocolate dough shouldn’t have, as it was the only part with nuked baking soda. Maybe the yeast was bad? Although it was in a sealed envelope and less than two months old, so I don’t see how that could have been the case. Ah well. I do want to try this again sometime…I just need to wrap my mind around it.

I was feeling so bad about this bread failure that I decided to whip something else up instead. I settled on the Pear Streusel Breakfast Buns in the “More from Magnolia” cookbook by Allysa Torey. I didn’t have any pears on hand, but I did have apples, and she suggests that apples can be substituted. This started with a pretty straightforward mixing of butter and sugar, eggs, flour, salt, baking soda and vanilla. Coarsely chopped apples were folded in and then spooned into muffin cups. The streusel topping that Torey suggested contained walnuts. I didn’t have any on hand, and I don’t care for them anyway, so I found a blueberry muffin crumb topping online (flour, sugar, butter and cinnamon) and used that instead:

These baked for twenty minutes and came out perfect:

These are quite delicious and are definitely good for breakfast, as they are not terribly sweet. The apples and crumb topping provide most of the sweetness, and there is a very slight eggy taste to the buns (one whole egg and two yolks were included). Good to know that I’m not a complete failure. I just think that Brioche was out to get me.

I’ve decided that I want to buy the “Martha Stewart’s Baking Handbook”, but as it is $40, I’ve decided that I must make at least one thing from every baking book I already own before I purchase any new books. So next week I’ll be turning to “The Magnolia Bakery Cookbook” and making Orange Vanilla Chip Cookies.

So I knew I wanted to bake a cake from this book. I settled on the Red Velvet Cake.

The recipe calls for cake flour, which I didn’t have in my pantry. I had All-Purpose and Self Rising, so I went on a search for cake flour. Giant Eagle turned up nothing, so one day after work I hit up Trader Joe’s, thinking they would probably have it. Nada. So I drove 20 miles out of my way to Whole Foods, thinking they would DEFINITELY have it. Nothing! At this point, I was starting to freak out a little, and checking the Web to see if I could substitute something else for cake flour. Finally I decided I would try Kroger’s, just to see.

Lo and behold:

Armed with my ingredients, I set to work. The next problem occurred when I noticed that the recipe called for six tablespoons of red food coloring. This is the food coloring I had on hand:

I quickly realized that one of those little bottles of food coloring is just about one tablespoon. So I would have needed six of those bottles! I used up all the red in that four pack, and then found an extra bottle of red food coloring tucked away in the pantry. But it only had about half a tablespoon in it, so I was four and a half tablespoons short. It would have to do.

I think it worked out fine:

Even after baking, the cakes stayed red:

This was a three layer cake. I only have two springform pans, so I had to bake two of the layers and then let them cool for an hour in the pans before I could bake the third layer. As you can imagine, this was an all-day affair.

I used the Creamy Vanilla Frosting the cookbook suggested, which was very interesting. It required cooking milk and flour for ten minutes, and then mixing up FOUR sticks of butter with sugar and vanilla before mixing in the milk/flour mixture. It made a ton of frosting, which I thought was going to be way too much. I underestimated how much icing it takes to frost a three layer cake.

Finally, it was time to cut into this bad boy.

I plated our slices on our new dinner plates. They tasted fantastic, although in the future, I will know to cut the slices much much thinner. We couldn’t finish our pieces!

Tune in next week when I’ll be making scones!