The Baking Bible: White Chocolate Cupcakes with Raspberry Mousseline

This is our second-to-last recipe! I can't believe it! (I still have about 10 or so recipes left to bake, but the official bake-through is coming to an end.)

Marie has decided we should be ending our two year long baking adventure on a couple of easy recipes, and I'm all for it. These cupcakes are a re-tread of Rose's popular White Chocolate Whisper Cake from the Cake Bible, scaled to make 16 cupcakes. The mousseline is another popular buttercream from the same book. Rose discovered a new way to pipe frosting on a cupcake that looks rather like a rose, so she decided to create this recipe to show us.

The batter for the cupcakes comes together lickety-split, including melted white chocolate which gives them a very tender crumb. Rose gives the weight for each cupcake so filling each cup is extra easy (if you own a scale). I decided to use my silicone cupcake cups as I only have one cupcake tin and I didn't want part of the batter waiting in the refrigerator. The cups were placed on a wire cooling rack on top of a baking sheet to bake, so that there would be airflow underneath the cups as well.

The mousseline took the better part of the morning. First up was making the raspberry puree, which requires concentrating raspberry juice (easy but messy in the microwave) and sieving the pulp to remove the seeds (takes forever; hate doing it). The pulp is mixed back into the concentrated juice and half the volume of sugar is added.

Then you can get to the making of the buttercream. Mousseline is Rose's take on Italian meringue buttercream and I'm not sure if it really is so different on end result. Certainly it is more fiddly and dirties more bowls. There might be more butter proportionally in mousseline than in Italian meringue buttercream, but that's just me guessing.

So anyways, butter is whipped in the mixer for a bit then set aside. In another mixing bowl, egg whites are whipped to stiff peaks with some sugar to stabilize (I skipped adding the cream of tartar, which also stabilizes the meringue). Meanwhile, a sugar syrup is boiled on the stove. Then the syrup is drizzled into the meringue while the beaters threaten to spin the sugar all over the sides of the bowl. Then the Italian meringue needs to cool down to about 70F. Then you whip up the butter again, add the meringue, and mix like crazy while the whole mess curdles, falls apart, then eventually turns into something decidedly creamy. It is nothing short of a miracle when that happens. Then a bunch of the raspberry puree is added in, which instead of turning my buttercream a pretty pink color turned it a bit of a mauve. Which is ok and still looks pretty, and works for a rose.

Then the dreaded piping happens. I actually am really surprised how well things turned out over here as I am not the best piper of frosting.

They are a wonderful cupcake; so light and soft. They look pretty and delicate and taste as such. I immediately wanted another cupcake, but in an attempt to model good behavior for Eliot I did not. He is in bed now, and of course I am eating another cupcake!