November's Cupcake Club Colaboration

For the past few months, whenever I would find myself in Indigo, I'd spend most of my time flipping through cupcake books, particularly the Martha Stewart Cupcake book (That or WWZ but since this is about cooking and not being a nerd...). A few weeks after the book staring started, I found a friend of mine who had also been eyeing the same book. And when we found out a mutual friend had the Martha Stewart book and would lend it to us, we started a cupcake club! It started something like this;

"OMG I LOVE CUPCAKES!!"
"ME TOO!!"
"OMG THIS ONE IS SOOOO CUUUUTTTEEEE!!!! EEEESJKHFSLHFS"
...and then our excitement went somewhere above the decibles audible to humans. We agreed to meet once a month to bake themed cupcakes and improve our baking/decorating skills. For our first meeting, we found a marble cupcake recipe with instructions to pipe pansies and sweet peas (a mother's day inspiration according to Martha).

What you need:

1 3/4c. cake flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/3 c. milk
1/3 c. heavy cream
1/2 c. unsalted butter
1 c. granulated sugar
3 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
1/3 c. cocoa powder
1/4 c. boiling water

Putting it together:


Start like most recipes; preheat the oven to 350F, line cupcake tins with liners. Combine the flour, baking powder, and salt in one bowl and milk and cream in another. In yet a third bowl, cream the butter and sugar together. Creaming the butter and sugar takes a few minutes and results in a light an fluffy batter that will help leven the cupcakes. Then add in the eggs one at a time followed by the vanilla. Lastly, add the flour mix and milk mix to the butter alternating between the two.

Now that the vanilla batter is done, it's on to the chocolate batter! Measure out 1 c. of the vanilla batter into a new bowl. In another bowl (the 5th used! Yikes!), mix the boiling water and cocoa which helps bring out the chocolate flavour, then mix the reserved batter and cocoa mix together.

In the cupcake tin, alternate 1 tbsp vanilla batter and 1 tbsp chocolate batter, ending with a last dollop of vanilla batter. Try not to pass the 3/4 mark of fullness in the cupcake liner. Swirl the betters with a knife or skewer to create the marbles effect. Cook for 20min and allow to cool on a rack.

Icing tiiiiiime!!! For this recipe I tried a new icing; Swiss meringue buttercream. It has all the buttery flavour of a buttercream but with the addition of meringue which stabilizes the icing making it softer to eat but more supple to pipe with. Whisk 1 1/4 c. granulated sugar into 5 egg whites over a bain marie (a bowl over gently simmering water). Whisk over heat until the egg whites are warm and the sugar has completely disolved. Remove from heat and beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form and the mixture has cooled. Slowly beat in 1lb butter by the tablespoon and 1 tsp vanilla until the icing is smooth.

Then just ice the cupcakes and decorate at will! We found the panies to be deceptively hard to pipe but the sweet peas are fairly easy and beautiful. I also used some dried coconut shavings to make a third, easier flower that is equally pretty.

Additional Notes:

This makes about 16 cupcakes. It had a really soft crumb but was maybe a bit dry for my taste. But they rose nicely and were great canvases for some decorating practice.


And for your viewing pleasure, here's pictures of the icing process, followed by some of our finished products. First a tray by my friend filled with pretty flowers. Then a punnet square of sweet peas (yes, that was a heredity/Bio30 reference), and some coconut flowers.