Car Bomb Cupcakes

In the past few weeks, I have been craving for cupcakes... specially those from Kara's Cupcakes. Although they were super duper delicious, I started to wonder if it made sense to spend $3 per cupcake – so I decided to make some myself. Since both Porgy and I are self-professed alcohol lovers, I used this Chocolate Whiskey and Beer Cupcakes from Smitten Kitchen - it's an intepretation of the Car Bomb drink in a cupcake form. It was my first time EVER making cupcakes and I am not much of a baker so I followed her direction to the T.

However, if I ever make this again, I would cut the Ganache filling in half to avoid having too much leftover at the end or maybe substitute it with some Salted Caramel filling to cut the richness and add some saltiness. I also had some difficulties with the Bailey's Buttercream icing. Who knew that making icing was that hard... I think my mistake was that I didn't let the butter warmed up enough to the room temperature. And since I sucked big time with the piping works, I used a couple of small spoons to drop a dollop of icing on top of each cupcakes. I think they still look pretty darn cute, don't they?


Ingredients:

The Guinness chocolate cupcakes:
1 cup stout (such as Guinness)
2 sticks (1 cup) unsalted butter
3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder (preferably Dutch-process)
2 cups all purpose flour
2 cups sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
3/4 teaspoon salt
2 large eggs
2/3 cup sour cream

Ganache filling:
(already cut to half the amount in the original recipe)
4 ounces bittersweet chocolate
1/3 cup heavy cream
1 tablespoons butter, room temperature
2 teaspoons Irish whiskey (I like it strong)

Baileys frosting:
3 to 4 cups confections sugar (I used almost 3.5 cups)
1 stick (1/2 cup) unsalted butter, at room temperature
4 tablespoons Baileys

Directions:

Follow the direction at Smitten Kitchen since she's the pro.

Lemon, Orange and Thyme Olive Oil Cake

What do you think I would make if I have plenty of lemons? First, I will make a couple glasses of Lemon Drops (the cocktail drink of course, NOT the candy) and, then after getting some buzz of it, I would attempt to make some kind of lemony desserts. I received a few lemons from AMV last week so I decided to make a variation of this yummy looking Lemon Cake - adding in extra lemon and orange zest and using thyme instead of lavender.

Side note: I used Whole Wheat Flour from Trader's Joe so the cake texture turned out to be a bit grainy (accordingly to Mo-Fo, it's corn-cake like). I guess I still need to figure out when and how to substitute all-purpose flour with whole-wheat flour correctly. Any recommendations?


Ingredients:
1.5 cups all purpose flour
1 cup + 1/2 cup sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 eggs
1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup olive oil
5 teaspoon lemon zest
5 teaspoon lemon juice
2 teaspoon orange zest
2 teaspoon freshly minced thyme leaves

Directions:

• Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
• Mix the flour, 1 cup of sugar, baking soda and salt in a large bowl.
• In a medium bowl, mix the eggs, milk, olive oil, 4 teaspoon of the lemon zest, 1 teaspoon of the orange zest and the thyme leaves.
• Add in the wet mixture to the dry ingredients in the large bowl and stir with a wooden spatula to combine. The batter will be on the wet-side.
• Pour the batter into a greased and floured 8.5"x4.5" loaf pan and bake for 55-60 minutes, until a wooden skewer comes out clean.
• A few minutes before the cake is ready, start making the glaze by heating 1/2 cup of sugar and the lemon juice in a small pot until the sugar becomes a syrup.
  
• When the cake is done, remove it from the oven and, while it's still in the pan, poke holes about 1" apart from the top of the cake all the way to the bottom using a long wooden skewer.
  
• Pour half of the glaze over the cake (while it's in the pan), let the cake soak the syrup and rest for 15 minutes before removing it from the pan to a platter.
• Add in the rest of the lemon zest (1 teaspoon) and orange zest (1 teaspoon) into the pot and cook over a low heat for 5 minutes or so until thicken. Be careful not to burn the syrup.
• Remove the syrup from the heat and wait for 30 seconds before pouring the thicken syrup over the cake.
• Let the cake cool for 30 minutes or so before serving.
  

Flourless Spiced Apple and Almond Tea Cake

A couple weeks ago I came across Flourless Apple and Almond Tea Cake at Citrus and Candy. The recipe seemed simple enough to follow and would be a perfect mid-day snack when I'm needing an energy boost.

In order to cut cost (since I bought most of my ingredients at Whole Foods), I decided to make my own almond meal by grinding the almonds in the food processor. It turned out delicious, but unfortunately was on the crumbly side because I couldn't grind the almond meal small enough. Next time I'll make it easy on myself and buy the almond flour, hopefully then it will turn out better. Lesson learned... In baking, just follow the recipe and not improvise like in cooking.


Here's the recipe according to Citrus and Candy, with the changes that I made:

Ingredients:
3 small apples - cored and cut into 8 wedges
30g (1.06 oz) unsalted butter
4 cloves (the original recipe only calls for 2)
4 cardamom (my addition)
50g (1.76 oz) raw caster sugar (I use powdered sugar, a mistake here. Maybe using regular sugar will be better?)
75g (2.65 oz or 1/2 cup) raisins

260g (9.17 oz) almond meal
220g (7.76 oz) almond
2 teaspoons baking powder
3 teaspoons ground ginger (the original recipe only calls for 2)
1/8 teaspoon nutmeg (my addition)
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon (my addition)
4 eggs
230g (8.11 oz) raw caster sugar (I used regular sugar)
125ml (1/2 cup) maple syrup

Apple and Almond Topping
2 red gala or granny smith apples - cored and thinly sliced
50g (1.76 oz) almonds, roughly chopped
20g (0.70 oz) unsalted butter - melted and slightly cooled
sprinkles of raw turbinado sugar

Directions:

• In a pan large enough to fit the apples in a single layer, melt the butter over medium heat and add the apples, cloves, cardamoms and sugar and mix to coat.
• Cook for 5-7 minutes, stirring occasionally, until apples are starting to color and softened.
• Remove the cloves and cardamoms, and add raisins and stir for a minute or two until raisins have softened.
• Remove from the heat and set aside to cool.
• Preheat the oven to 160C (325F) and grease and line a 10-inch springform tin with baking paper.
• In a food processor, pulse the almond meal, almonds, baking powder, ground ginger, nutmeg and cinnamon until roughly chopped. Set aside.
• In a large bowl, whisk the eggs, sugar and maple syrup until thick, pale and fluffy - at least 5 minutes with an electric mixer. Note: After 5 minutes, mine still looked a bit watery and didn't get thicken up.
• Add the almond nut mixture and gently fold to combine.
• Add the apple mixture and gently fold to incorporate. Pour into a cake tin.
• Arrange the apple slices on top of the cake batter, overlapping a little to make a decorative circular pattern. Sprinkle the nuts over, drizzle with melted butter and scatter with sugars.
• Bake in the oven for 60-75 minutes (mine was closer to 75 minutes) until skewer comes out clean of cake batter.
• Remove from the oven and let cool completely in the cake pan before slicing and serving.

Carrot Cake for My 100th Post

Yeah... it's my 100th post, I'm so excited! After thinking carefully, I decided to celebrate this occasion by baking a Carrot Cake. Since I have never baked a cake before, I used Pastry Pal's recipe because she always has great step-by-step instructions and useful tips.

One cake done, another to go


Stacking the cake layers together


Smothering the cake with some frosting


Completely frosted. Voila!


Tomorrow is my sister's birthday so I'm dedicating this cake for her. Although she doesn't live nearby, I thought it would be a nice to send her some pictures of the cake so she can salivate over them. Happy Birthday, Irene!