Voting is open for this month’s MBCC: FIZZY! The roundup for the final(!) challenge is at the link above and the poll to vote is on the right hand side of the page. Please vote for the Cherry *POP* Cupcakes by Olga (+ any other second cupcake that catches your fancy)! ^_^ Polling is open now through the 26th of June.
I haven’t entered the Mystery Box Cupcake Challenge in a while, but this month is the final contest! I was actually going to make two cupcakes, but after baking the first kind, I ended up with 36(!) cupcakes and no room in my fridge. Oops. But I’ll most likely make the second kind anyway, just to see how it’ll turn out.
This month’s theme is FIZZY, which was certainly à propos since I got a case of Mexican Coca-Cola at Costco just days before it was announced. For those who don’t know: Coca-Cola imported from Mexico is made with real cane sugar, rather than the high fructose corn syrup in its American counterpart.
My result: the Cherry *POP* Cupcake. The idea was to make a Coca-Cola flavored cake base, with cherry frosting, and a “secret” ingredient: Pop Rocks candy sprinkled on top for that ultimate fizzy feeling.
The good news is that the Pop Rocks worked wonderfully; provided you ate the cupcake quickly enough that they didn’t have time to dissolve in the frosting. I also came across really cute Wilton “Sweet Dots” baking cups that fit the theme really well. The bad news is that the cupcake tasted nothing like Coca-Cola + cherry. :( I tried soaking the cake with Coke syrup (a bottle that’s just been boiled down), but it didn’t really work, though the syrup itself was deliiiiiiicious. >_> The frosting was half butter/half cream cheese, with a puree made from fresh cherries mixed in. However, I think I would have been better off using artificial flavoring; the cherries didn’t really add much to the frosting, besides color.
Oh well, the cupcake still tasted really good—it’s difficult to go wrong with cake and frosting! It just sadly wasn’t the way I wanted it to/thought it would taste.
The winner of June’s Mystery Box Cupcake Challenge will receive prizes from:
- Angela’s Images; a selection of handmade crafts
- Bake It Pretty; a $5 online gift card
- Beanilla; a $7 online gift card
- cupcakewrappers.com; 2 packs of cupcake wrappers
- Miss Kitty Creations; a handmade cupcake charm of your choice
- Simply Caked; 600 brown greaseproof cupcake liners
- Sweet Cuppin Cakes; a $5 online gift card
- Tundra Books; 3 children’s books
Thank you to all our prize sponsors!
Voting is open for this month’s MBCC: Orange! You can find the round up for this iteration of the challenge at the link above; the poll to vote is, as always, on the right hand side of the page. Please vote for the Indian Summer Cupcakes, by Olga! ^_^ Polling is open through the 26th of October now closed.
Edit: Thank you to everyone for voting! I ended up in the top 6 cupcakes and won the random drawing! :D
To please fans of both fall and Halloween, the October Mystery Box Cupcake Challenge “ingredient” is the color orange, with the requirement that either the color or an orange-colored ingredient appears in the cupcake. However, I was never big on Halloween, having spent nearly all of my childhood in places where it didn’t really exist, and fall just means that my favorite season, summer, is done with.
In the spirit of being in total denial that summer is officially over—what seemed to be our last 95ºF heat wave wrapped up last week—I created the Indian Summer Cupcake. Just like its namesake, this cupcake looks like fall, but feels (tastes) like summer, which to me means: margaritas! There are lots of margarita cupcake recipes floating out there, but it seems like most are just lime cupcakes with the occasional tequila thrown in. Not so with these! They aim to replicate the yummy taste of the real deal.
The secret to a great margarita is five-fold: tequila, lime juice, triple sec, agave syrup, and salt. This cupcake replicates it with a lime-tequila chiffon cake, agave custard filling, orange-triple sec glaze, and a swirl of salted caramel buttercream on top. Here are the recipes:
Lime-Tequila Chiffon Cake
adapted from Joy of Cooking (Scribner 2006)
2¼ cups sifted flour
1¼ + ¼ cups sugar
1 tbsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
5 large egg yolks, room temperature
⅓ cup tequila, room temperature + enough freshly squeezed lime juice to make ¾ cups of liquid (from about 3-4 limes)
1 tbsp grated lime zest
½ cup canola oil
1 tsp vanilla extract
8 large egg whites, room temperature
½ tsp cream of tartar
Preheat oven to 325ºF. Into a large bowl, sift flour, 1¼ cups sugar, baking powder, and salt. Add egg yolks, tequila and lime juice, vegetable oil, zest, and extract. Beat on high until smooth. In another large bowl, with clean beaters, whip egg whites and cream of tartar until the soft peak stage. Gradually add the remaining ¼ cup of sugar. Beat until the whites start losing their gloss. With a spatula, carefully fold in one quarter of the whites into the batter, then fold in the rest. Spoon batter into a paper lined cupcake pan—if you are not using liners, do not grease the pan or the cupcakes won’t rise—each cup should be about three quarters of the way full. Bake for 16–18 minutes.
Makes approximately 28 cupcakes.
Agave Custard
3 large eggs
⅓ cup dark agave syrup
3 tbsp water
6 tbsp unsalted butter, cut into pieces
In a medium stainless steel saucepan, whisk eggs and syrup until the mixture is a light brown color. Add water, butter, and place over medium heat, stirring until the butter has melted. Keep heating, whisking constantly until the mixture begins to thicken and bubble at the edges. Strain through a sieve into a bowl, press plastic wrap to the surface of the custard to keep a skin from forming, let cool and refrigerate until thick.
Fills approximately 28 cupcakes.
Orange-Triple Sec Glaze
1 cup confectioners’ sugar, sifted
2 tbsp triple sec
1 tbsp melted butter
1½ tsp grated orange zest
Mix all ingredients in a small bowl until the glaze is smooth. For a more orange appearance, add 5 drops of yellow and 1 drop of red food coloring.
Glazes about two dozen cupcakes.
Salted Caramel Buttercream
4 egg whites, room temperature
½ tsp cream of tartar
½ cup sugar
¼ cup water
2 sticks unsalted butter, cut into pieces + 1 tsp salt OR 2 sticks salted butter, cut into pieces
Combine sugar and water in a small saucepan over medium heat and stir until sugar has dissolved. Bring to a boil, wash down crystals from the sides of a pan with a moistened brush, and let cook until a deep golden brown color (355–360ºF). Meanwhile, beat egg whites and cream of tartar until soft peaks form. Keep mixing, and in a thin and steady stream, making sure to avoid the beaters, pour in the sugar syrup. Add salt, if using. Keep beating to cool down. Gradually incorporate butter until frosting is smooth.
Makes enough for small swirls of frosting for 28 cupcakes with about a cup left over. 2½, 3 cups total?
Assembly
Using the cone method, fill cupcakes with custard. Turn each cupcake upside-down and dip in the glaze, making sure to shake off the excess before turning right side up—the glaze will drip down otherwise. Chill cupcakes in the refrigerator for about 5 minutes to set the glaze. Top with a swirl of buttercream and a sprinkle of kosher salt, if desired.
The winner of October’s Mystery Box Cupcake Challenge will receive the following prizes:
- a selection of handmade crafts from Angela’s Images
- a $5 electronic gift card from Bake It Pretty
- 2-fold Madagascar vanilla extract & 3 Tongan vanilla beans from Beanilla
- a pack of Sweet Stands cupcake stands from Hello Hanna
- an 8.5”x11” original art print of her or his choice from Lisa Orgler
- a handmade cupcake charm of her or his choice from Miss Kitty Creations
- a prize pack worth $25 from Sweet Cuppin Cakes
- and a selection 3 very sweet children’s books from Tundra Books
As always, a big thank you to all our prize sponsors!
Voting is now open through October 26! Please vote for the Indian Summer Cupcakes, by Olga in the poll on the right hand side. :)
A huge thank you to everyone who voted! I ended up in the top 6 cupcakes and won this month’s competition! ^_^
It’s that time once again! Voting is open for September’s Mystery Box Cupcake Challenge #3: Childhood memories through the 26th. My entry is the Lac Léman Cupcakes by Olga and you can find it towards the bottom of the poll on the right of the page. Thanks for voting! ^_^
Making my Lac Léman Cupcakes was quite an adventure. First came my double take upon finding that the recipe I wanted to use for hazelnut filling was misprinted. I originally thought I would have to attempt to bastardize an egg custard recipe for the filling of my cupcakes, but looked up hazelnuts in the back of my Joy of Cooking on a lark. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the book already had a recipe for a hazelnut filling, but my good mood soon fell when I discovered that the last half of the recipe made little sense due to what looks like some errant copy-pasting. I sent off a message to the e-mail for reporting errors listed on the website—which helpfully provides an errata PDF—but received no response.
Then came turning the grocery store upside-down in search of hazelnuts and rose water, the result of which was disappointing as my regular store carried neither. Thankfully, the Whole Foods a few miles down the road had a large selection of nuts one could self-dispense and carried rose water as well. Success!
I ended up just going for it on the misprinted recipe, hoping to figure it out as I go, and everything thankfully turned out tasty.
However, I can’t say the same of the rose-flavored meringue. I have since fixed the recipe, so you are getting a much better version, but my original results with it were absolutely foul due to a stupid mistake on my part. I hadn’t realized that rose “water” isn’t actually water, it’s an extract in the same vein as vanilla and other flavors. If I hadn’t blanked so badly on that fact, I would have never put two tablespoons(!) of it in my meringue. I thought I could just replace the two tablespoons of water originally called for in the recipe with the rose “water” and was so afraid that the rose flavor wouldn’t come through that I even reduced the amount of sugar. Boy was I in for a surprise when the meringue tasted like someone accidentally dumped a whole bottle of rose perfume into it! Yuck! We ended up scraping the topping off.
Despite that failure, I had a lot of fun using my new propane torch to toast the top of the meringue. This was the first time I’ve ever used anything like it and was understandably afraid that I would set fire to the tablecloth or burn myself. After a thorough reading of the directions, some initial troubles with lighting the torch, and mild cursing at the insensitivity of the gas valve—my flame choices seemed to be either 5 inches long or practically dead—I finally managed to toast the topping to my liking. The edges of the paper cups were slightly singed, but my tablecloth made it out alive, and I didn’t set off the smoke alarm. The “Fat Boy” came quite handy in making the cupcakes beautiful.
Here are all the recipes:
Milk Chocolate Cake
Heavily adapted from the White Chocolate Truffle Cake recipe in Super Cookery: Chocolate and Baking (Parragon, 2001).
4 eggs, separated
⅓ cup sugar
⅔ cup all-purpose flour
4 oz milk chocolate, melted
Whisk the egg yolks and sugar until pale yellow. Mix in flour, then chocolate—batter will be heavy. Beat egg whites until soft peaks form; gently fold them into the batter, one quarter of the whites at a time. Bake in paper lined cupcake cups at 350°F for 17 to 20 minutes. Makes 12.
Hazelnut Custard
Fixed from Joy of Cooking (Scribner, 2006).
1 cup sugar
1 cup sour cream
1 tablespoon all-purpose flour
1 egg
1 cup ground hazelnuts
Combine sugar, sour cream, and flour in the top of a double boiler or a medium heatproof bowl set over, not in, boiling water, and heat, stirring, until slightly thickened. Beat the egg in a small bowl, then stir in about one third of the sour cream mixture to temper the egg. Return the egg mixture into the double boiler, and stir in the ground hazelnuts. Cook while stirring until the custard is thickened. Makes 1½ to 2 cups.
You will have a lot of it left over unless you make a triple to quadruple batch of cupcakes, but it’s nice to eat just on its own, honestly.
Rose-flavored Swiss Meringue
Adapted from Joy of Cooking (Scribner, 2006).
4 egg whites, room temperature
¾ cup sugar
2 tbsp water
¼ tsp cream of tartar
2 drops red food color
2 tsp rose water (rose extract)
1 tsp vanilla extract
Add the eggs, sugar, water, cream of tartar, and food color into a large heatproof bowl set in a wide, deep skillet filled with simmering water. Make sure that the water comes up to at least the same level as the whites in the bowl. Beat the mixture on low speed until it registers 140ºF on an instant-read thermometer. Make sure to not stop beating, else you will get scrambled egg! If you can’t hold the thermometer while beating, remove the bowl from the skillet to take the temperature, then immediately return it to the water bath and keep beating. Once 140ºF is reached, switch to high speed and beat until the mixture reaches 160ºF. Remove from water bath, add the extracts, and beat for a few more minutes until the mixture cools. The meringue should be glossy and stiff. Makes enough for 12 cupcakes.
Assembly
Once the cupcakes are cool, fill them with the hazelnut custard using the cone method. Spoon the meringue on top and shape with a small offset spatula or a clean finger dipped in water. Using a propane torch set on a low flame, lightly toast the outside of the meringue.
Perhaps in an attempt to decrease the number of entries from last month’s record twenty-eight by providing a tougher challenge, the secret ingredient for the third Mystery Box Cupcake Challenge isn’t an ingredient, it’s a theme: Childhood Memories. Despite some well intentioned—and tongue-in-cheek—suggestions from friends to make borscht flavored cupcakes as a nod to my being Russian, I decided to go with a Switzerland theme, and thus was born the Lac Léman Cupcake.
It is a milk chocolate cake with a creamy hazelnut filling and a slightly toasted, rose-flavored, Swiss meringue topping.
I lived in Europe for a total of four and a half years of my life, at two different points in my childhood. Half of these were spent on the Swiss side of the border near Geneva and half on the French side. An early memory of the first two years is from when I was four: the first outing that my parents and I took to the banks of the Geneva lake and Parc la Grange, which houses the biggest rose garden in Geneva. It’s interesting that I remember the photo that my dad took of my mom and me on the lawn in front of our apartment building right before the outing—the first picture of us in Switzerland—although I don’t remember the photo being taken. The rose garden at Parc la Grange, the adjoining Parc des Eaux Vives, and the numerous other gardens, parks, and villas on the Lac Léman were places we came back to again and again, on both our first and second trips. As a result, the topping for this cupcake is rose-flavored, Swiss meringue, with the foamy texture as a nod to the appearance of the Jet d’Eau.
Of course one can’t talk about Switzerland and sweets in the same sentence without mentioning the delicious chocolate. Most people may go straight for the Toblerone, but I always had a preference for plain, milk chocolate unsullied by nougat (and the occasional pack of mini European Milky Ways). In fact, milk chocolate was invented in Switzerland! Thus, I decided to go with a milk chocolate cake for the base.
Finally, since I could not ignore my introduction to the heavenly substance that is Nutella, the center of the cupcake features a sweet and creamy hazelnut filling, which pairs very well with the lightly chocolate flavored shell.
The winner of September’s Mystery Box Cupcake Challenge will receive:
- a $5 electronic gift card from Bake It Pretty
- an autographed copy of the new book Cake Pops from Bakerella
- two beans of each of the special vanilla varieties found at Beanilla
- a pack of Sweet Stands cupcake stands from Hello Hanna
- a handmade cupcake charm of his or her choice from Miss Kitty Creations
- a prize pack worth $25 from Sweet Cuppin Cakes
- and a selection of three very sweet children’s books from Tundra Books
Thank you to all our prize sponsors!
And thank you to everyone for voting! I had the top cupcake in this month’s competition, but sadly, did not win the random drawing.
Voting is now open for Mystery Box Cupcake Challenge #2: White Chocolate through August 26th! Please vote for White Chocolate Raspberry Truffle Cupcakes, by Olga in the poll on the right hand side. :)
As promised, here are the recipes for the White Chocolate Raspberry Truffle cupcakes! These were the first thing I baked with my new KitchenAid Artisan. ♥
White Chocolate Cake
Heavily adapted from the White Chocolate Truffle Cake recipe in Super Cookery: Chocolate and Baking (Parragon, 2001). I’ve attempted to make this cake multiple times and could never get the truffle part to set up; the cake portion, however, always turned out dense and delicious. To lighten it up and have it rise more, I separated the eggs and beat the whites on their own.
4 eggs, separated
½ cup sugar
⅔ cup all-purpose flour
4 oz white chocolate, melted
Whisk the egg yolks and sugar until pale yellow. Mix in flour, then chocolate—batter will be heavy. Beat egg whites until soft peaks form; gently fold them into the batter. Bake in paper lined cupcake cups at 350°F for 17 to 20 minutes. Makes 12.
Before spooning the batter into the pan, cover the bottoms of the cups with about a tablespoon of seedless raspberry jam per cup.
Chocolate Truffles
I used Martha’s chocolate truffle recipe, omitting the liqueur. In retrospect, I should have made them much smaller, using my ½ teaspoon dome spoon measure, rather than the full teaspoon one. The truffles were so large, I ended up having to practically shove them into the cupcakes! Once the cupcakes have baked and cooled, use the cone method to put a truffle inside each.
Toppings
The topping is simply whipped cream with melted white chocolate: 2 ounces of chocolate per 1 cup of heavy whipping cream gives it a hint of chocolaty goodness without being too bland or too sweet. Yields enough to top 12 cupcakes.
I sprinkled the whipped cream with raspberry sugar, gifted to me by my dear friend Megan after a day trip to Charleston, SC.
The cookie is from Paula Deen’s Magnolia Lace Trumpets. You could halve the recipe and still end up with too much! We were nibbling on the cookie bits long after the cupcakes were gone. My cookies all ran together because I wasn’t patient enough to bake only two at a time, though it turned out well since it ended up easier to use my kitchen shears to cut the giant sheet of cookie into triangles. Make sure to work quickly; once hardened, the cookie becomes brittle and shatters!
August’s Mystery Box Cupcake Challenge secret ingredient is: white chocolate! As it happens, it’s my favorite kind of chocolate—yes, I see your upturned noses, dark chocolate lovers. ;)
Since baking a plain white chocolate cupcake would hardly be innovative, I let my gears turn in search of a flavor to pair it with. The flavor combination that immediately came to mind was white chocolate and coffee, a duo that always disappoints me as a white chocolate lover since I’ve never liked coffee—I’m fairly certain Starbucks was invented for people like me. I however hit on something with the second combination: white chocolate and raspberry. This, in turn, reminded me of the best ice cream flavor in the whole world (yes, even better than caramel cone!), Häagen-Dazs’ White Chocolate Raspberry Truffle.
And thus, I decided to create the White Chocolate Raspberry Truffle Cupcake.
It’s a white chocolate cake cupcake, with seedless raspberry jam at the bottom, a semi-sweet chocolate truffle in the center, topped with white chocolate whipped cream, a magnolia lace cookie, and a sprinkle of raspberry sugar. Pretty much heaven in a white paper wrapper.
Here are the recipes used in these cupcakes!
The winner of August’s Mystery Box Cupcake Challenge will receive the following prizes:
- a $5 electronic gift card from Bake It Pretty
- 3 Indian and 3 Tahitian vanilla beans, plus a jar of Ground Vanilla from Beanilla
- a cupcake ring from CT2Designs
- a cupcake charm of his or her choice from Miss Kitty Creations
- a prize pack worth $25 from Sweet Cuppin Cakes
Thank you to all our prize sponsors!
And thank you to everyone who voted for me. I made the Top 5! :D
