d’Arte Board

I made cupcakes today with my beautiful assistant, Mark Bodah–same guy from my earlier post.  They’re chocolate with peanut butter frosting, all made from scratch.  Mark arranged the chocolate chips on top.  I think it’s a lovely touch.

EDIT for Tommy: Recipe included after the jump!

For the cupcakes, I mostly followed the Black Midnight Cake recipe from Betty Crocker’s 40th Anniversary Edition Cookbook except I substituted mostly oil with a little butter for the shortening because shortening just doesn’t seem like a good idea ever. My dad’s rants about hydrogenated fats impacted my at a young age. That and I mixed the wet ingredients and the dry separately and then add the dry to the wet. I’ll type out the proper unaltered cookbook recipe and you can alter as you see fit.

2 1/4 c flour
1 2/3 c sugar
2/3 cocoa
3/4 c shortening
1 1/4 c water
1 1/4 t baking soda
1 t salt
1/4 t baking powder
1 t vanilla
2 eggs

Heat oven to 350 degree. Beat all ingredients 30 seconds on low speed, scraping bowl constantly. Beat on high speed 3 minutes, scraping bowl occasionally. Pour into cupcake thingys. I use the foil ones and space them out on a cookie sheet with enough room around them for the heat to circulate evenly. Bake for about 16 to 20 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the middle comes out clean. 19 minutes works perfectly in my wonky oven.

For the frosting I bastardized the peanut butter variation of Betty’s Creamy Vanilla Frosting from the same cookbook. I doubled the recipe, used soymilk instead of cow milk (I never have cow milk on hand and wasn’t about to buy it especially for this), added a little melted butter and used a little less sugar. I prolly changed something else but I can’t remember. Here’s Betty’s version.

3 c powdered sugar
1/3 c peanut butter
1/2 t vanilla
1/4 to 1/3 milk

Mix powdered sugar and peanut butter. Stir in vanilla and milk. Beat until smooth and of spreading consistency. I really think doubling it is the way to go if you’re making cupcakes. A scantily clad cupcake just comes off as cheap.

So far, these were a big hit with my lovely assistant. I still haven’t heard any reports from the rest of the recipients but Mark is a quite a cupcake aficionado so they were prolly pretty dang good. In conclusion, recipes are like loose guidelines. They’re there to assist you in making something that tastes yummy and won’t give you the scoots. As long as you understand the bones of it all, a little (or lots of) body modification is A-OK. Remember kids, it’s not like baking is a science! ahahahahahahahahaha!!!!!

Love,
Steph The Improvisational Chef

This entry was posted on January 2, 2010 at 7:15 pm and is filed under "But Is It Art?", Stephanie Gerolimatos with tags chocolate, cupcakes, peanutbutter, yum. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.