A Picture Post For You

I have to say that lately the Fred Meyer has been sucking in the baking ingredients department. My new favorite grocery store, aside from the New Seasons, is the QFC. I almost like them a little more, only because they are open 24 hours. I love a 24 hour grocery store; it can save my baking reputation when I am baking in the middle of the night (which happens often). The QFC saves my butt and even better, they have exactly what I need when I run out of bittersweet chocolate, organic sour cream, cake flour, or cane sugar. Hooray!

April 6, 2006
Occasion: schmoozin with the doulas
Name of (cup)cake: chocolate cupcakes with frozen frostings
Constituents: chocolate butter cupcakes with defrosted vanilla buttercream, or chai chocolate buttercream, or chestnut cloud cream

Told in picture book form for the illiterate.

first off, a public service announcement. you gotta date your baking powder. not only will he pay for all the fancy dinners, but he rises to any occasion, if you know what i mean. but careful, he expires pretty quickly.

time to get my bake on. wow. i did some shameless product placement in this photo.

i'm trying to find an alternative to white sugar. RLB uses milled cane sugar; this is pretty close enough, i think.

however, the grains are GIGANTIC. gotta process them down into a very fine grained sugar. better for baking. using the food processor.

the food processor sucked ass. i found my roommate's coffee grinder and it worked almost TOO well--the white bowl is the ground sugar and it is almost powdered. hoo-wee!

defrosting the butter. i always keep about 2 boxes of butter handy in the freezer. butter freezes beautifully, unlike some things...

this is just water and cocoa powder, but it looks yummmy, doesn't it?

(blah, blah, blah, you do some mixing, blah, blah, blah, you put the batter in the pan, you bake it, you take them out...)

then you let the little suckers cool. do you see the little speckles? is that because not all the sugar was dissolved in the batter before baking? Should i have cake anxiety? of course.

batch 2: made four hours later with cold, stiff, refrigerated batter. no speckles this time! what does this mean??

the little stubby cupcake was ready for his vanilla frosting

little stubby was joined by five of his friends...and an outsider: mr chai chocolate buttercream cupcake. mr chai chocolate buttercream cupcake was quickly rejected by stubby and his posse, mainly because mr chai chocolate buttercream cupcake's chai chocolate buttercream hat was badly put on. probably because the buttercream that made up his hat defrosted all thick and sticky and no one had an electric beater to whip it back into submission. mr chai chocolate buttercream cupcake disappeared shortly after this photo was taken.

so the chestnut whipped cream ("cloud cream") once defrosted, had curdled. note to self: whipping cream doesn't freeze beautifully.

i decided to gently reheat the chestnut cream and let the solids melt back into the liquids, which it did, really nicely. i stuck the whole thing in the refrigerator to cool the cream down and thicken it up, hopefully enough to still use to frost the cupcakes. so when i checked back later, the cream was thick but still runny. so i decided to try and whip it with a fork. and guess what happened?

curdled again!>

reheated, again.

so i decided EVERYBODY is getting frosted in vanilla buttercream

the little stubby cupcakes were dense, moist, and tender. the buttercream kicked ass: creamy, bourbon, vanilla goodness.

the doulas loved them, i loved them--hooray for stubbycakes!

are your teeth hurting from all the sugar? then here, look at this:

VEGETABLES! you can stop going into insulin shock now.