food, glorious food

i meant to publish this earlier…

have a merry christmas!

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the frosting: i’ve always wanted to make a fruity frosting using real fruit. more than several times, i’ve been duped by vanilla buttercreams masquerading around in pretty pastels. they seem to say to me, “what are you in the mood for? baby blue or cotton candy pink?” as if the colors make them taste different, or even BETTER than vanilla. but really, what you see is not what you expect to get. like when i selected a halloween-themed cupcake at magnolia, i half expected the orange-colored frosting to taste like oranges. even though i knew the cupcake was a vanilla-vanilla cake-frosting combination, i still couldn’t help but be disappointed by the absence of even a hint of orange flavor. this time, i had strawberries in mind. i was also in the mood for making a delicate pink-colored frosting, so strawberries definitely fit the bill.

the cake: one of my labmates requested a chocolatey cupcake, and so the strawberry-covered chocolate cupcake was born. since i’ve recently made chocolate cupcakes back-to-back-to-back, this gave me an opportunity to try out yet another chocolate cake recipe. from the previous recipe, i learned that buttermilk adds richness to the cake. so i took a tried and true devil’s food chocolate cupcake recipe (the one i used for abe and erin’s wedding), and tweaked it to contain a cup of buttermilk instead of one and a half cups of milk. that was my idea of merging two good recipes so that i would get a cake that was moist, but not too fluffy.

the verdict: the cake came out exactly as i had imagined, and the strawberry buttercream made me think that i was eating strawberry ice cream. man, oh man…this cupcake was pure bliss.

My Best Chocolate Cupcake Yet
makes 24 cupcakes / 350 degree oven

2 cups flour
2 cups sugar
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1-1/2 teaspoons baking soda
1 cup buttermilk
1/2 cup butter
2 teaspoons vanilla
2 eggs

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

1. Measure out everything but the eggs directly into your mixer bowl.
2. Mix on low speed just until incorporated.
3. Beat on high speed for 2 minutes.
4. Add eggs, beat on high speed again for 2 minutes.

Fill lined cupcake tins 3/4 full. Bake for about 15-20 minutes until a toothpick comes out clean. Let cool slightly in the pan then transfer to a rack to cool completely before frosting.

Strawberry Buttercream

1 stick butter
4 cups confectioner’s sugar
~1/4 cup milk
strawberry reduction (cook half of a 12 oz bag of frozen strawberries on medium to high heat, with 2 tsp sugar and a few tsp lemon juice. cook until liquid has evaporated significantly — you want it as “dry” as possible, to avoid getting runny frosting.)

1. Beat butter on high for about 30 seconds until soft.
2. Add 3 cups sugar and beat until incorporated
3. Add half of the milk and the remainder of sugar and beat until incorporated.
4. Add strawberry reduction and mix.
5. Continue to add milk and sugar until you get to the consistency you want. (I found that adding the strawberry reduction softens the frosting significantly, so I corrected for this by adding more powdered sugar. Too much powdered sugar, though, can make the buttercream sickeningly sweet, and this, in turn, masks the real strawberry flavor. I would recommend either adding more lemon juice while simmering the strawberries to offset the sweetness, or including more butter in the recipe to thicken it up.)