Martha Stewart’s Red Velvet Cupcakes

I have a cupcake order coming up next month for a baby shower, and they’ve requested red velvet cupcakes, so I am testing out red velvet cupcake recipes in the next few weeks to find the very best one. 

Today I used Martha Stewart’s Red Velvet Cupcake recipe pretty much exactly as it was. This is a great cupcake. The flavor is good, the cupcake is moist, and it pairs beautifully with a basic cream cheese frosting (I used Martha’s Cream Cheese Frosting, though I added an extra splash of vanilla). The cupcake did not turn out very red, so I would definitely bump that up if you want a very red cupcake. Also, despite their great flavor, these did not dome up well, which was disappointing. Lastly, if I made them again, I would try decreasing the oil a tiny bit to see if the wrappers might be a bit less greasy, though I wouldn’t want to lose any of the terrific moistness.

Overall, these cupcakes are great; no one will be disappointed to eat one.  

Do you have a perfect red velvet cupcake recipe? Share it with me and I may feature it on the blog! 

Ingedients (Red Velvet Cupcakes)

2 1/2 cups cake flour (not self- rising), sifted
2 tablespoons unsweetened Dutch-process cocoa powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 1/2 cups vegetable oil
2 large eggs, room temperature
1/2 teaspoon red gel-paste food color
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1 cup buttermilk
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
2 teaspoons distilled white vinegar

Directions (Red Velvet Cupcakes)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line standard muffin tins with paper liners. Whisk together cake flour, cocoa, and salt.

With an electric mixer on medium-high speed, whisk together sugar and oil until combined. Add eggs, one at a time, beating until each is incorporated, scraping down sides of bowl as needed. Mix in food color and vanilla.

Reduce speed to low. Add flour mixture in three batches, alternating with two additions of buttermilk, and whisking well after each. Stir together the baking soda and vinegar in a small bowl (it will foam); add mixture to the batter, and mix on medium speed 10 seconds.

Divide batter evenly among lined cups, filling each three-quarters full. Bake, rotating tins halfway through, until a cake tester inserted in centers comes out clean, about 20 minutes. Transfer tins to wire racks to cool completely before removing cupcakes. Cupcakes can be stored overnight at room temperature, or frozen up to 2 months, in airtight containers.
To finish, use a small offset spatula to spread cupcakes with frosting.

Cook’s Note

Gel-paste food color is much more concentrated than the supermarket liquid variety; if you substitute the liquid, you may need to add an entire bottle (1.5 ounces) to achieve the desired shade.

Ingredients (Cream Cheese Frosting)

8 ounces (2 sticks) unsalted butter, room temperature
12 ounces cream cheese, room temperature
1 pound (4 cups) confectioners’ sugar, sifted
3/4 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

Directions (Cream Cheese Frosting)

Beat butter and cream cheese with a mixer on medium-high speed until fluffy, 2 to 3 minutes. Reduce speed to low. Add sugar, 1 cup at a time, and then vanilla; mix until smooth.

Chocolate Orange Christmas Bundt

Image is of a chocolate bundt cake on top of a red and green quilt. My mom made that quilt, isn’t it lovely?

When my dad and brothers eat out at a restaurant, they always order the “Death by Chocolate” dessert, so when I bake a cake for the family at Christmas, I always try to make something very chocolatey. If I don’t, I’ll get comments like, “This cake is good… but there isn’t enough chocolate.” Last year I made this Deep Dark Chocolate Cake, which was a chocolate layer cake made with black cocoa filled with raspberry jam and topped with both a whipped and poured chocolate ganache.

Chocolate and orange together have always seemed rather Christmassy to me, probably in part due to the seasonal nature of citrus during the winter, and also because my family has sometimes bought those chocolates that are infused with orange that you smack on the table and come away with individual slices of chocolate. This year, I planned a chocolate orange bundt with a poured chocolate ganache on top. (I’m finally ready to face bundt pans again after doing Micah and Casey’s many-bundt wedding cake in September.)

I’ve seen this Cook’s Illustrated chocolate cake recipe talked about all over the internet for ages, and it always seemed like a pain to me. Really? Cocoa and bittersweet chocolate? Boiling water for a cake? But here’s the great thing about using the boiling water – it means that you don’t have to melt down the chocolate in a double boiler, so you don’t have to wash that extra pan, but you still get the lovely richness from the chopped chocolate.

I’ve adapted the recipe to add orange extract and orange zest to add flavor without disrupting the dry/liquid balance of this tried and true recipe. It really came out wonderfully, a cake that wasn’t too sweet and was perfectly complimented by the poured ganache. It looked beautiful on our holiday table and was wonderful with a dollop of fresh whipped cream. If you don’t celebrate Christmas, it would be wonderful for the new year!

Ingredients

3/4 cup Dutch-processed cocoa (2 1/4 ounces)
6 ounces bittersweet chocolate, chopped
3/4 cup water (boiling)
1 cup sour cream, room temperature
1 3/4 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon table salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
12 tablespoons unsalted butter (1 1/2 sticks), room temperature
2 cups light brown sugar (I used a scant two cups rather than packed two cups to cut back on the sugar a bit)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2-3 teaspoons orange extract
zest of 1 orange
5 large eggs, room temperature

1 batch of poured ganache

Directions

Grease and lightly dust a 12-cup Bundt pan with cocoa powder. Adjust oven rack to lower-middle position; heat oven to 350 degrees.

Combine cocoa, chocolate in medium heatproof bowl; pour boiling water over and whisk until smooth. Cool to room temperature, then whisk in sour cream. Whisk flour, salt, and baking soda in second bowl to combine.

In stand mixer fitted with flat beater, beat butter, sugar, vanilla, and orange extract on medium-high speed until pale and fluffy, about 3 minutes. Reduce speed to medium and add eggs one at a time, mixing about 30 seconds after each addition and scraping down bowl with rubber spatula after first 2 additions.

Reduce to medium-low speed; add about one third of flour mixture and half of chocolate/sour cream mixture and mix until just incorporated, about 20 seconds. Scrape bowl and repeat using half of remaining flour mixture and all of remaining chocolate mixture; add remaining flour mixture and beat until just incorporated, about 10 seconds. Scrape bowl and mix on medium-low until batter is thoroughly combined, about 30 seconds. Add orange zest and stir. Pour batter into prepared Bundt pan, being careful not to pour batter on sides of pan.

Bake at 350 degrees F until wooden skewer inserted into center comes out with few crumbs attached, 50 minutes to an hour. Cool in pan 10 minutes, then invert cake onto parchment-lined wire rack.

Prepare the ganache (Recipe is in a separate post here) and pour it over the cake. Let the ganache set (this could take a few hours). Keep refrigerated until a few minutes before serving. Serve with fresh whipped cream.

Cocoa Cranberry Oatmeal Muffins

Oatmeal in the morning on a cool day is an awesome thing, right? But sometimes you don’t make enough, and other times (especially when you set it up in your slow cooker and then people rush out the door without breakfast anyway) there is tooooo much oatmeal. You don’t want to throw it out, but if you save it, do people really eat the leftovers? They will if you turn them into muffins! Say, Cocoa Cranberry Oatmeal Muffins?

I’m not sure that I got a photo of these muffins, but they were really tasty and they’re pretty healthy – I substituted nonfat yogurt for some of the butter and reduced the sugar, used whole wheat flour, and of course, they’ve got the healthy power of oatmeal in there, too! I was surprised at how light and fluffy these came out. I’ll definitely make them again when we have oatmeal leftovers, and if you don’t have cranberries, throw in raisins or chocolate chips or nuts or anything else you can think of!

The basis of this recipe originates here, which was a great help since I wasn’t quite sure how my oatmeal leftovers were going to factor in.

Ingedients

1 3/4 cups whole wheat flour
1/2 cup cocoa
1 cup brown sugar
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 tablespoon baking soda
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1 1/2 teaspoons ground ginger
1/2 cup butter
1/4 cup nonfat greek yogurt
4 medium eggs (or 3 large)
2 teaspoons vanilla
2 cups leftover cooked oatmeal (our leftovers were steel cut oats)
1 cup cranberries, sliced

Directions

In a large bowl, combine flour, cocoa, cinnamon, ginger, brown sugar, baking powder and baking soda.

In another bowl, mix together melted butter, eggs, oatmeal, yogurt, cranberries, and vanilla. Add wet ingredients to dry ingredients and stir just until moistened. The batter will seem thick, but don’t worry. Adding more liquid may make the muffins too crumbly.

Spoon batter into 24 greased muffin cups.

Bake at 350 degrees for 18 minutes, or until the muffin centers are slightly firm.

Chocolate Peanut Butter Surprise Cookies (Veg*n)

[I started this the other day, but didn't get a chance to post it! Cookies are baked and shipped!] One of my younger brothers is a music education major, and this summer, he’s teaching music at a summer camp on the left coast. I got an email from my mom last week saying that he’d requested a care package “including cookies,” and my mom asked if I felt like baking some.

Chocolate chippers are usually my go-to cookie when it comes to giving them to people, since almost everyone loves a good chocolate chip cookie, but seeing as I’m in the NYC area, and my brother is currently in California, and the heat has been reaching triple digits, I figured that mailing anything with chocolate chips would end up looking pretty sad.

My mom suggested that my brother liked sugar cookies, and although I hate hate hate rolling out sugar cookies, I’ve been feeling a bit more adventurous lately and decided to give it a go. So far this morning, they’ve been a complete failure, but I will try to win again later.

The other cookie that I thought would be a hit with my brother are these chocolate peanut butter surprise cookies. I rarely make them because they (similar to rolling out sugar cookies and then decorating them) are labor intensive. The end result, however, is very cool.

To make these cookies, you first make a chocolate cookie dough (this one happens to be vegan), and then, separately, you make a simple peanut butter filling. The labor intensive part comes next, where you sit at your kitchen table for a looooong time, smushing little discs of chocolate dough, putting a little ball of peanut butter filling in the center, then carefully wrapping the chocolate cookie dough around it. If you work carefully, there will be no trace of the peanut butter on the outside, and only when the person bites into the cookie will they discover the peanut butter filling (just make sure you don’t serve these to someone with nut allergies!).

This recipe is floating around the internet from a million different sources. I don’t have it memorized, so I had a look at the one here before modifying it a bit.

Ingredients

1 1/2 cups flour
1/4 cup cocoa powder
1/4 cup black cocoa
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 cup Earth Balance
1/4 cup vegetable shortening (you can use all Earth Balance, but I was mailing these and wanted something a little less prone to melting)
1/3 cup sugar
1/3 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup soy milk
1 egg replacer
1/2 cup powdered sugar
1/2 cup peanut butter
1/3 cup chocolate chips (optional – I left them out this time because I was mailing them in during summer)

Directions

In a medium bowl, mix flour, cocoa powder, black cocoa, and baking soda.

In the bowl of a stand mixer, cream together the Earth Balance, shortening, sugar, and brown sugar. When combined, mix in the egg replacer.

Add the flour mixture to the wet ingredients and mix.

In a separate small bowl, mix the powdered sugar and peanut butter with a spoon or your hands. (I find that your hands work best here, otherwise it will just turn into small crumbs of peanut buttery powdered sugar, and you really want them thoroughly mixed into a paste.) When ingredients are incorporated, add the chocolate chips (if desired) and knead further with your hands to incorporate the chocolate chips.

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Take about a 2 tablespoons of the chocolate dough in your hand, and roll into a ball. Flatten the ball on the parchment paper to form a disk. Take a pinch (or about 1 teaspoon) of the peanut butter mixture and place in the center of the disk. Fold the edges of the disk up and over the peanut butter, pressing the seams together. Place the cookie seam-side down on the parchment paper to bake.

Bake for 8-12 minutes in a preheated 350°F oven. Cool on wire baking racks.

Chocolate Cola Cupcakes

For Christmas, Charlie got me both of the Baked books after I’d ooohed and ahhhed over them in Barnes and Noble one day. I’ve tried out one or two of the recipes (let me say right now that I cannot wait to make Aunt Sassy Cake), but since I often make up my own recipes or have other folks request something that they’ve already had, it’s tough for me to follow something exactly from a book.

I’ll start out by mentioning that we really don’t drink soda. I am one of those people who is morally opposed to high fructose corn syrup (there! I’ve said it!) for many reasons (feel free to email me if you want to see me on a soapbox), but Charlie had to run an event for his job the other week, and we ended up with some soda at home. We donated most of it to another event, but there were a few rogue cans that got left behind.

I remembered seeing a recipe that had root beer in it in one of the Baked books, so I hunted it down. They wanted root beer, and I had coke, so that was the first change I made. The second change I made was, as usual, to reduce the amount of sugar in the recipe, but other than that, I pretty much stuck to it.

This recipe is based off of the Root Beer Bundt Cake from Baked: New Frontiers in Baking. They came out really good, though they didn’t have too much of a soda flavor. I expected it to be not-too-pronounced since it was coke and not root beer, but I think I may try the recipe again and try the tip that they included: If you can find root beer schnapps, replace 1/2 cup of the root beer in the cake with root beer schnapps for a more pronounced taste.

**I’m giving away a neat set of measuring spoons! Check out the giveaway here!

Ingredients: Cake
2 cups cola or root beer (do not use diet)
1 cup dark unsweetened cocoa powder (I used KAF’s black cocoa)
1/2 cup unsalted butter, cut into 1-inch pieces
3/4 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup firmly packed dark brown sugar
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/4 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
2 large eggs

Ingredients: Frosting

2 ounces chocolate (the recipe called for 60% cacao, but I shockingly only had semi-sweet, and it turned out just fine)
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup of whichever soda you chose above
2/3 cup dark unsweetened cocoa powder
2 1/2 cups confectioners’ sugar

Directions

Preheat the oven to 325°F. Line cupcake tin with papers. (This recipe was originally made for a 10 inch Bundt pan. If using a Bundt pan, generously spray the inside of the pan with nonstick cooking spray or butter it, dust it with flour, and knock out the excess flour.

in a small saucepan, heat the root beer, cocoa powder, and butter over medium heat until the butter is melted. Add the sugars and whisk until dissolved. Remove from heat and let cool.

In a large bowl, whisk the flour, baking soda, and salt together.

In small bowl, whisk the eggs until just beginning. Add a small amount of the cooled cocoa mixture to the beaten eggs to ensure that they are tempered. Combine the two mixtures and whisk. Gently fold the flour mixture into the cocoa mixture. The batter will be slightly lumpy–do not over be, as it could cause the cake to be tough.

Pour the batter into the prepared cupcake tins and bake for 15 to 22 minutes or until a toothpick inserted comes out clean. If using a Bundt pan, bake for 35 to 40 minutes. Cool on a wire rack.

To make the frosting, put all the ingredients in a food processor. Pulse in short bursts until the frosting is shiny and smooth.

You may use a piping bag to frost cupcakes or simply use a spatula to spread the frosting on the cupcakes and/or on the bundt. Let the frosting set before serving. For a cute decorating twist, cut straws to be shorter, then stick them into the cupcakes. Serve with ice cream if desired.

Deep Dark Chocolate Cake

Thanks to my Uncle Dan for this great photo!

Cakes are not usually my thing.

I make a good cookie, a tasty muffin, and a damn good brownie, but I usually don’t put the time and energy into making awesome cakes. Sometimes I’ll make cupcakes, but whole cakes with fancy frosting, definitely not. They’re just not easy to cut up and pass out, and in a small household, we’re not going to eat a whole cake.

But a few weeks ago, I sent my mom a simple, one-line email asking her if Christmas Eve dinner was going to be at her house as usual. It’s a tradition that the immediate family gets together the night before the holiday so that everyone can spend some time together and open presents before everyone has to travel on Christmas.

My mom sent me back about five paragraphs about how hectic the week was. This brother had to be picked up from college out of state, that brother was coming home on this day, the next day we were doing that, and, since my mom is a social worker, she had to actually work on Christmas Eve. So, she said, she wasn’t sure when she was going to have the time to cook.

Since just reading her email was stressing me out, and I didn’t even have to DO any of the stuff that she had to do, I suggested that Charlie and I be in charge of cooking. My sister ended up getting involved, and my brother who just graduated college was around and helped, and even my littlest brother, who is 11, felt pretty important with some of the things he was tasked with (like helping me make lasagna) that day.

But almost more important than the actual dinner was the dessert. My family loves chocolate. They think I’m the weirdest kid around for preferring more delicate flavors like fruits, teas, or vanilla. I made sure to prepare something I’d enjoy, but I also knew I had to really bring it in terms of dessert.

I recently bought some black cocoa from King Arthur Flour, and I wanted that to make an appearance in the dessert I made, and it ended up in the cake itself.

This dessert looks complicated, and my family thought it was downright professional, but when you break it down into steps, it isn’t that difficult.

• Chocolate cake (based very loosely off of a Texas Sheet Cake) made with black cocoa
• Raspberry jam filling
• Whipped semi-sweet chocolate ganache
• Poured darker chocolate ganache

This was my first time making ganache, and it went very well. I also made sure that this cake wasn’t too sweet so that I was really featuring the richness of the cream, the depth of the chocolate, and the layers of the chocolate.

P.S. The Art & Baking Giveaway is open until Friday, so hop over there for a chance to win!

Ingredients
1 cup of butter
2 cup of all purpose flour
3/4 cup of white sugar
1/2 tsp of salt
3 tbsp of tablespoons cocoa
3 tbsp of black cocoa
1 cup of boiling water
1/2 cup of buttermilk
2 eggs
1 tsp of baking soda
1 tsp of vanilla
3/4 cup of raspberry jam

For the whipped ganache:
1 cup of heavy cream
8 ounce of semi-sweet chocolate

For the poured ganache:
1 cup of heavy cream
10 ounce of 65% dark chocolate

Directions

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.

Prepare a 12″ x 17″ sheet pan by greasing the edges of it and putting a piece of parchment paper, trimmed to size, in the bottom.

In a large mixing bowl, combine the flour, sugar, and salt.

In a small pot, melt the butter.

Add the cocoa, and mix into the butter. Add the boiling water. Let boil for a few seconds, then turn off the heat. Pour the cocoa mixture over the flour mixture and stir slightly. In a separate small bowl, mix the buttermilk, eggs, baking soda, and vanilla. Stir the buttermilk mixture into the cocoa mixture.

Pour into the prepared sheet cake pan. Bake at 350 degrees for 20 minutes.

Immediately when the cake has come out of the oven, flip the cake out onto another piece of parchment paper and peel back the parchment paper from the bottom. Let cool.

When the cake is completely cool, cut into four even pieces. Use a pastry brush to paint the layers on all sides with raspberry jam.

Next, make the whipped semi-sweet ganache. In a double boiler over medium heat, bring 1 cup of cream almost to a boil. Turn off the heat and stir the semi-sweet chocolate into the cream. Mix until smooth.

Set this mixture aside to cool at room temperature for about two hours. When cool, use a stand mixture to whip into a frosting. Stack the layers of the cake, then spread the whipped ganache around the outside of the cake.

Repeat the process of heating the second cup of cream, this time, using the dark chocolate.

When the mixture is smooth, let it cool and thicken for about three to five minutes, so that it is almost the consistency of honey. Then, pour the mixture over the frosted cake. (It will run over the sides, so you’ll want a pan underneath to catch it!)

Let the ganache set. Keep refrigerated until serving. Decorate as desired. (I used a thin glaze of confectioner’s sugar and edible glitter.)

Dressmaker’s Double Stout Cookies

I don’t even like chocolate cookies, and I like these.

The “double” in the name is for double chocolate – chocolate cookie, chocolate chips. I also made them twice in the last week, which is really unusual for me. Generally, I like to experiment with new and unusual varieties of recipes, so for a nearly identical version of a recipe to turn up in the house more than once in a short period of time is almost unheard of. (The only exception to this is my go-to brownie recipe since I can throw it together super quickly and everyone loves it.)

Charlie only got to taste a few of these cookies during the first round, since batch number one was a gift for an old employer of mine (a dressmaker, which is where the name comes from), and most of the leftovers went home with my brother, Jon, who was around when I was making them. Charlie and I had a few friends over for a non-poker card night (games like Spoons, Bullshit, Egyptian Ratscrew, Asshole, and Fluxx are on our agenda), and I decided to whip them up again (though I substituted a Shipyard Pumpkin Ale instead of the Lion’s Stout). Charlie said he was so glad I made them again right away because sometimes I make something he really loves and then he has to wait for ages for it to come back into circulation again! They were a huge hit with our friends that came over, and I spread the goodness around a bit further by sharing some with my sister and my art teacher.

I’m generally a fan of the “puffy” cookie when I’m baking, but when it comes to chocolate chocolate chip, I definitely think chewy is the way to go. I’d acquired some bulk vital wheat gluten when we were at our friend’s hippie co-op in Massachusetts a few weeks ago, so I added extra into the recipe to make them really chewy, and the texture was awesome.

Don’t forget to enter the giveaway of that darling teapot! Details are here.

Jon helped me with the dishes and “helped” with this photo…

Ingredients

3/4 cup butter
3/4 cup dark brown sugar
1/2 cup white sugar
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 cup all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons vital wheat gluten*
3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 12 oz can of Lion’s Stout (or other dark stout)
1/2 a bag of dark chocolate chips, give or take

*If you don’t have vital wheat gluten, it’s not the end of the world. It just makes the cookies chewier (and even add a little protein!). Another option for making chewier cookies is to substitute bread flour for all-purpose flour. The cookies will still be delicious, chocolatey stout cookies without either of those changes.

Directions

First things first. Start your stout simmering in a small saucepan on the stove on low heat… that’s going to take a while. You want to reduce it until it’s a syrup-y consistancy. Make sure that you check on it occasionally and stir it. At the beginning, it may be inclined to form a “head” like when you pour beer into a glass, except way more extreme, so keep an eye on it or it will be all over your stove.

Cream together the butter and the brown sugar and the white sugar in the bowl of your stand mixer, or in a large bowl. Add the eggs, one at a time, mixing as you go. Add the vanilla extract after that and give it a good stir. Check on the stout.

In a separate medium bowl, combine the flour, vital wheat gluten, cocoa powder, salt, and baking soda. Stir them with a wisk (since I never bother to sift my flour) to get the big lumps out.

Check on the stout. If it’s not looking very much reduced, turn up the heat a little, but watch it even more closely. (While I was writing this, my laptop was directly next to the stove with my trusty wooden spoon in between to stir it up if needed.) You’ll notice that the stout starts to coat the bottom of the pan when it’s almost ready. The final amount of stout will be a little less than 1/4 cup. It will obviously be quite hot, so I pour it into a glass measuring cup and put that in an ice bath before putting it into the cookie dough mixture.

When the syrup is finally the proper consistency, preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Mix the dry ingredients and the syrup into the creamed mixture. Finally, stir in the chocolate chips.

On a parchment lined baking sheet, drop tablespoons of the cookie dough. Bake for 10-14 minutes depending on your oven and your preference for softer or crispier cookies.

Cardamom Lime Cake with Chocolate Cream Cheese Frosting

Yes, I admit it. I bake my own birthday cakes. (I should probably mention that I turned 26 this year, not 6, right?)

For some reason everyone always has a problem with this right up until they lift their forks up to their mouths, and then… well, then they sigh a little, and admit, “You’re right, you’re a baker, no one else here could have made this,” or some similar praise that puts me up on a pedestal.

I’m not a huge cake eater. I’m sure I’ve mentioned before that I prefer ice cream above all other sweets, but I’d take a good cookie over cake. But, birthdays are birthdays, and for birthdays, there is cake. (If you’re wondering about my ridiculous decorations… I felt weird telling myself “Happy Birthday!” so instead I declared, “I Was Born!”)

My favorite cake is usually the classic yellow cake with chocolate frosting. When I go to a cupcake shop, like Billy’s Bakery on 9th Ave, that’s what I’ll get, perfectly topped with just a few adorable sprinkles. I wanted to make something nostalgic, but also something a bit more refined, something that showcased how I’d grown in the way that I use flavors. I started thinking about cardamom, with just a bit of lime zest… and finally a chocolate cream cheese frosting to match the tang of the lime.

I don’t bake regular old cakes very frequently, and I still don’t have a go-to recipe for yellow cake. I’ve tried Wilton’s, I’ve tried Betty Crocker’s, I’ve tried some random chick from the internet’s. This time, I tried the “Fluffy Yellow Cake” from America’s Test Kitchen. It was decent, but still not exactly what I was looking for, and it would have been far too sweet had I not (as always) reduced the sugar.

Another thing to note about me is that I almost never bake cakes that require separating eggs. It usually ends up being wasteful around here, but since I had plans for a Lemon Blueberry Chiffon Cake with a Lavender Glaze, my eggs actually worked out!

Cardamom Lime Cake – Ingredients

2 1/2 cups cake flour, plus extra for dusting pans
1 1/4 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
3/4 teaspoon table salt
1 cup sugar
10 tablespoons unsalted butter , melted and cooled slightly
1 cup milk, room temperature
3 tablespoons vegetable oil
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 teaspoons cardamom
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
1 tablespoon lime zest
6 large egg yolks, room temperature
3 large egg whites, room temperature

Cardamom Lime Cake – Directions

Adjust oven rack to middle position and heat oven to 350 degrees. Grease a giant round cake pan if you’re going to make the ridiculous thing that I did, otherwise, this will make two 9″ pans. Whisk flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and sugar together in large bowl. In medium bowl, whisk together melted butter, milk, oil, vanilla, and yolks.

In clean bowl of stand mixer fitted with whisk attachment, beat egg whites at medium-high speed until foamy, about 30 seconds. Continue to beat until stiff peaks just form, 30 to 60 seconds (whites should hold peak but mixture should appear moist). Transfer to bowl and set aside.

Add flour mixture to now-empty mixing bowl fitted with whisk attachment. With mixer running at low speed, gradually pour in butter mixture and mix until almost incorporated (a few streaks of dry flour will remain), about 15 seconds. Stop mixer and scrape whisk and sides of bowl. Return mixer to medium-low speed and beat until smooth and fully incorporated, 10 to 15 seconds.

Using rubber spatula, stir 1/3 of whites into batter to lighten, then add remaining whites and gently fold into batter until no white streaks remain. Divide batter evenly between prepared cake pans. Lightly tap pans against counter 2 or 3 times to dislodge any large air bubbles.

Bake until cake layers begin to pull away from sides of pans and toothpick inserted into center comes out clean, 20 to 22 minutes. Cool cakes in pans on wire rack for 10 minutes. Loosen cakes from sides of pans with small knife, then invert onto greased wire rack. Invert cakes again and cool completely on rack, about 1 1/2 hours.

Chocolate Cream Cheese Frosting – Ingredients

Well, Bo woke up before I did on the day of the party, so he got started on the frosting. I can’t be sure exactly what ratios were used, only that it was based off of my Maple Cream Cheese Frosting recipe that he found on here, haha, and that when I did wake up, I kept saying, “I want a darker chocolate.”

So, I’m guessing that it was something like…

1 stick unsalted butter
8 oz cream cheese
1/2-3/4 cup cocoa powder
1 cup confectioners sugar

Chocolate Cream Cheese Frosting – Directions

Make someone else get up earlier than you on the day of your party. Have them dump all the ingredients in the stand mixer and have at it until smooth. If desired, add more confectioners sugar or more cocoa powder. Refrigerate for 30 minutes before frosting.

Knee Surgery Pie (Chocolate & Berries)

It’s probably a little late in the day for me to post a Valentine’s Day suggestion recipe, but you never know. Maybe you’re having a late, late dinner, or celebrating a day late. I’m not really into V-day – my partner and I had some cuddles and got his mom flowers.

This recipe is one from the archives. In fact, this is the first recipe that I recorded in my journal, and decided that I’d keep my recipes online, and really, was the start of my food blogging before I did actual food blogging.

It’s for Valentine’s day because I stenciled hearts on it, and because it’s very decadent, and because when I had knee surgery is when I started getting shmoopy with Charlie. (The two year anniversary of us and my knee surgery is next month.)

The great thing about this recipe, if you’re cooking a dinner for Valentine’s day, you can use a pre-baked crust from the store, and make the pudding on the stove while all your other dishes are going on, which is a little easier than trying to measure flour, user your stand mixer, and all that jazz, while you’re stirring stuff and checking on the roast in the oven.

So, while this could be something that was totally from scratch and took a while, it could also be something that was thrown together in a relatively quick amount of time and was really, really impressive. Don’t be a stickler for the type of fruit you use – February can be a difficult time to get really beautiful fruit, so if strawberries look better than raspberries, go with them, and so on. Pick the berries that look the best, but try your hardest to get fresh, not frozen. Frozen is a last resort.

Here is the original text from my entry:

I’ve decided I’m going to start recording my recipes/cooking excursions in here, because I always make notes on the actual printed recipe and then lose it, and just get it off the internet again… so here we go!

Today I baked a pie that I was thinking about after watching that movie “Waitress.”

The layers went like this:

• prebaked pie crust (from scratch)
• layer of melted bittersweet chocolate, painted on the bottom and sides
• layer of crumb topping
• layer of crushed raspberries and blackberries
• layer of chocolate filling (sort of pudding like)
• rings of fresh berries (& optional decorative confectioner’s sugar)

The main problem I recall having with this recipe was getting the filling to thicken.

Ingredients

1 single layer pre-baked pie crust (either store bought or Charlie’s Consistent Win Pie Crust

Chocolate Lining:
2oz bittersweet chocolate

Berry Filling:
2 pints blackberries (half reserved for decoration)
2 pints raspberries (half reserved for decoration
1-2 teaspoons white sugar

Crumb Topping:
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons butter, diced
Sprinkle of cinnamon

Chocolate Filling:
1/4 cup butter
1 cup white sugar + 2 tablespoons
2 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder
3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
2 egg yolks
1 cup milk
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
a little bit of cornstarch in case of emergency

Directions

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

First, crush a pint of raspberries and a pint of blackberries slightly to release some of the juices. Taste the berries to see how sweet they are, then stir them with the 1-2 teaspoons of sugar. Let this mixture sit out while you prepare the rest of the pie.

Next, prepare the chocolate filling. In a cast iron skillet, if available, or other heavy bottomed pan, over medium low heat, melt the butter or margarine.

Combine one cup of the sugar with cocoa and flour. Beat the egg yolks with the milk and add them to the sugar mixture. Add the sugar and egg mixture to the skillet with the melted butter and cook gently, stirring constantly until thick. (Watch this mixture closely as it has a tendency to burn!) Add the vanilla.

When I first made this at the very beginning of my culinary adventures, I had trouble making the chocolate filling thicken. If this happens, don’t panic. What I did was add a thickening agent, like cornstarch, and it worked out just fine. I haven’t tried to make it again since then, so I’m not sure if it was the way I was cooking it or the recipe! But – in case of emergency – there’s your fix. But also – this pie does better if it sits in the refrigerator for the correct amount of time, so if you’re not going to have enough time to refrigerate, you’re going to want the cornstarch. If you have time to refrigerate overnight, you can be satisfied with a slightly less set filling.

Make your crumb filling by mixing the flour and sugar together in a bowl, then cutting the butter in with two knives, a fork, or a pastry blender just until the topping is crumbly.

Melt the bittersweet chocolate in a double boiler and paint it with a spatula along the bottom and inside edges of the crust. Let this cool.

Pour the berry filling into the bottom of the pie crust with the chocolate shell.

Pack in the crumb topping on top of the berry filling. This layer will help serve as a barrier between the two chocolates so that they don’t just melt together in the oven!

Pour in the chocolate filling. Do not overfill the crust.

Bake the pie at 350 for 10-15 minutes.

Remove pie from oven and let cool on counter for 20 minutes. Decorate with berries around the edges, and if desired, stencil confectioner’s sugar hearts on the pie. Refrigerate for at least 3 hours or overnight.

Mocha Pillow Cookies

We have a guest baker on the blog today! (Actually this transpired a few weeks ago, but I’ve been terrible about getting it posted.) Our friend Jack just moved to NYC, and one of the first things we decided that we should do was to have a baking party. Our other friend, and Jack’s “person,” Eli, came over, too, as Eli was visiting from so we had a couples baking night.

Jack (left) works at a coffee shop, so ze* brought us some espresso to make some yummy mocha cookies. Ze also brought me a nonfat vanilla iced latte with just a tiny bit of syrup, just the way I like it! Thanks, Jack. Eli is the helper on the right.

These cookies came out extremely soft and fluffy. They were like little mocha pillows. A word to the wise, though… As delicious as these cookies are, don’t get carried away eating them before bed. We did, and between that and the excitement of our visit we didn’t get to bed until six in the morning. Ridiculous!

Ingredients

1/4 of dutch cocoa
2 2/3 cups flour
1 1/4 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
pinch salt
1 cup unsalted butter
1/4 cup white sugar
1 cup packed light brown sugar
1 tsp vanilla, or a little more
2 egg whites and 1 whole egg (this happened because we were baking a cake, too, and had some extra whites – feel free to just use two whole eggs)
2 cups dark chocolate chips (though we made some without chocolate chips, too)
6 shots of espresso

Directions


Preheat oven to 350° F. 

Combine flour, baking soda, cocoa, and salt in small bowl.

Cream butter and sugar in a large bowl. Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. Add vanilla and espresso and stir.

Add flour a little at a time, scraping the sides of the bowl. When all the flour is mixed in, stir in the chocolate chips. Drop by big spoonfuls onto parchment paper.

Bake about 10 minutes or until golden brown. Cool on wire racks.

*Ze is a gender neutral pronoun. If you’re just not sure how they fit into parts of speech, there’s a chart here. If you want to read more about the what/why/how, feel free to email me, or, (as much as I hate to use wikipedia as a reference, there’s currently some good information on there), you can view the Wikipedia page on gender neutral pronouns here.

“Environmentally Friendly” Cakey Brownies

As I mentioned the other day, my friend Bo popped by from Brooklyn to eat Kale-Came-in-Our-Farm-Share Creamy Potato Soup with us. I already had some Spiral Herb Rolls going on one rack in the oven, and I figured that it would simply be a waste of energy to not whip up some brownies that cooked at the same temperature and for about the same amount of time.

We actually have had a box of brownie mix sitting in our cupboard for months. It’s not crappy mix, either, it’s King Arthur Fabulous Fudge Brownie Mix, which I’ve admittedly never had, but I enjoy their other products and got the brownies tossed in free when I spent an obscene amount of money at their store in Vermont last fall. The mix sits untouched, however, since I almost always decide that if I’m going to dirty a bowl, dirty a pan, add an egg and add some oil, I may as well make brownies from scratch.

My go-to recipe for brownies lately has been this one, and I’ll probably still use it sometimes, but Charlie says the recipe below is his new favorite. I had to come up with this one because I was stuck at home with our broken-down car, and I didn’t have enough chocolate to melt to make the other ones. I did, however, have some dutch cocoa powder. These are a little more “cake-like,” but definitely still fudgy. If you don’t want to go to the trouble of melting chocolate in a pot, this is the recipe for you.

Ingredients

1 cup butter, melted
2 cups white sugar
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
4 eggs
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup unsweetened dutch cocoa powder
1 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup chocolate chips
3/4 cup chopped walnuts (optional)
3/4 cup Heath Bar Toffee Bits (optional)

Directions

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Lightly grease (or line with parchment) a 9×13 baking dish.

Combine the melted butter, sugar, and vanilla in a large bowl. Beat in the eggs, one at a time, mixing well after each, until thoroughly blended.

Sift together the flour, cocoa powder, and salt. Gradually stir the flour mixture into the chocolate mixture until blended. One at a time, stir in the chocolate chips, walnuts, and toffee bits. Spread the batter evenly into the prepared baking dish.

Bake in preheated oven until an inserted toothpick comes out clean, 30 to 35 minutes.

Cool pan on wire rack before cutting.