Caramel love cupcakes

I have been terribly negligent, using my parents arrival as an excuse to not bake. I apologize and hope to get back on schedule shortly. First though, I will take a cooking break to a) work on papers and b) give people time to vote on the next baked good. Hopefully I will post the choices on here in the next few days.

     For now, here is the winner of the last vote, the Caramel love cupcake!

Here is the inspiration:

here is what I ended up with:

 

 Ta da!

     There you have it. I actually made a traditional french butter-cream for the frosting... and then added caramel of course. From the feedback I have decided that the cake is probably not the best, and is rather dense but the frosting is a winner. Also, people loved my mock-stroopwaffle. Since I could not find such a thing in the stores, nor did I have money to buy all the ingredients needed to make the real thing I bought apple-cinnamon waffles, cut them in half, put cinnamon and caramel in the middle, and because I had no small cookie cutters, cut them into pie wedges. I like the look, and so far I have heard no complaints against the taste, so I call it a win. 

     So that people have time to vote on another kind of baked good I think I will make the mead frosting cupcakes so that I can play with a different kind of apple cake batter and see if some other recipe might be more satisfying.

For now, I hope all of you who tried the cupcakes enjoyed them, and I will attempt to be more consistent with the blog in the future. Here's hoping.

Choose your poison

     I have finally found a home for the two rainbow cakes from my previous post. I have been informed that the first cake did not have sweet enough frosting, so for the second I attempted to remedy that by adding more powdered sugar to the butter cream frosting. I have been told by a few that it worked, but if you are reading this and disagree I would love to know. I am on a diet that inhibits sugar intake so I'm honestly not the best judge of what is sweet enough right now. Which brings me to my next baking project... but first - I wanted to show you want I did with the left over tops of the cakes (that I got rid of with the awesome cake leveler.)

 

     Ta da! I decided to take some disposable shot glasses, crumble the cake and layer it with the frosting. I think it turned out quite charming for some extra bits of cake that I thought about tossing out. I am now ashamed that I almost threw all that yumminess away. It would have been quite a waste.
 
     As I was saying earlier though, my taste for sweets is off a bit of late and I would like to remedy that. This coming week I want to focus as much as possible on flavor. While I still care about ascetics, I feel that I should learn more about how to make things taste the way I want them to, and the way other people like them to.
     I will bake one of four styles of cupcake this coming week. The choices are all listed below, complete with picture and description of each. I would love for as many people to vote as possible. You can leave a comment on this blog, or post your vote on Facebook, or Twitter. You can even email me your vote if you feel so moved! Point being, VOTE. That way I know what people want to eat and I can bake accordingly. And remember, those who vote, get at least one cupcake!
     Now that I have firmly established this "I want people to vote thing" let me set out the guide lines for voting. The important thing to know is that you can vote for more than one cupcake. If you do vote for more than one, please rank your picks. You can tell me why you voted, or you can simply write the title of the cupcake. Eventually I will figure out how to make a poll on here and things will get a lot easier for you guys.

     IMPORTANT: Let me know if you are allergic to any of the current cupcake picks. I do not want to be responsible for a trip to the hospital and the use of an Epi-pen. I will do my part and list the ingredients (other than the obvious flour/milk/cream/sugar/butter), do your part and keep me from injuring friends.

      Now that that's out of the way, let's get to the cupcakes.

1. The "Love Carmel Cupcake"

This cupcake was designed by a loving blogger in memory of her mother. If you would like to see her blog she is over at http://www.thelonebaker.com/. This cupcake is full of carmeley goodness with some apple-spice thrown in for good measure. The waffles on top are dutch stroopwaffles (hard waffles with caramel in the middle) and baking this cupcake would mean an excess of those, so be prepared to suffer. ;)

Ingredients: Apples, Cinnamon, Caramel, Vanilla, pie spice

2. The "Apple Cinnamon Cupcake (with Mead Frosting and a Honey Swirl)"

This cupcake was inspired by the Rosh Hashana tradition of dipping apples in honey. The recipe I would use is from the blogger at http://www.cupcakeproject.com which is where all of the cupcake recipes below would come from. If I cannot find someone with an open bottle of mead who is willing to donate to tablespoons I may have to change the frosting to a cinnamon one. So keep that in mind while voting.

Ingredients: Applesauce, apples, cinnamon, mead, honey

3. The "Better than sex cupcake"

No really, that's it's actual name. There are five different types of chocolate in this thing. If you want chocolate, vote for this. This is no ordinary cupcake.

Ingredients: Vanilla, chocolate, cocoa powder, salt, coffee, brandy(maybe), white chocolate

4. The "Yogurt and Honey Cupcake"

This is the cupcake to choose is you are tired of the heavy sweet flavors. It gets lightness from the yogurt in the batter and the fact that the frosting is yogurt (with a honey drizzle). Don't get me wrong, these are still sweet, just in a different way. If you want something interesting and different, this is the cupcake for you.

Ingredients: Geek yogurt, vanilla, honey, salt


So there you have it. The four choices for this week.  Choose wisely as you all have to eat them.

The cake is not a lie!

     My hands may look like I cleaned up after a sick unicorn, but I have completed the famed rainbow cake. This cake would have taken very little effort if not for the amount of dyes that I had to mix. My icing apparently did not come out as sweet as I would have liked, but I will still count this a success rather than failure since my whole point was to focus on coloring and icing instead of flavors.
     The only "specialized" equipment I used was a cake leveler and an icing spatula. If you do not know of the magic of cake levelers and you bake often, you should check them out. I had no idea how I would stack three rounded cake layers without them tipping over, and then there was the cake leveler. It's basically a garrote wire between two sticks. You place the sticks on the counter, make sure the wire is at the correct height, and drag the wire across the cake. It was quite easy and wonderfully helpful. The icing spatula was also a help, but was not new to me, so not as interesting to play with.
 

  

      Coloring the batter took a lot of dye. The red batter took 115 drops of red dye - over half the bottle. The green icing took almost 100 green drops. If anyone is interested in the exact ratios I can give them to you, but I didn't want to go into the boring details here. I used a plain white cake mix with applesauce instead of oil for the batter.

The cake layers themselves only took about 18 minutes to bake at 350 F since I used small four inch spring form pans (so that I would have several small cakes to ice instead of one large one.) I think the colors turned out wonderfully. I made my own butter cream frosting for the icing. It made the cake quite tall and the slices looked a bit odd, but there was no danger of it toppling thanks to the cake leveler!

 

     Here is the finished product! I reversed the color progression from the picture I found (I thought red made more sense on the bottom so that blue was next to violet.) I found that my original sprinkle method (throw them and hope they stick) did not work quite as well as applying them with a spoon. I simply filled the bowl of the spoon with sprinkles, and pulled it up the sides of the iced cake. There were very few empty spots left after using that method. In order to ice the cake I put it on a cake round with the turntable from my microwave underneath (it's cheap and it works!) That turned out to be unnecessary since the cake was so small, but it was still fun to get to spin the cake around instead of trying to maneuver my arm in such a way to keep the icing smooth.

     I took the finished product to gaming tonight, and here is a picture to give the scale of the cake. If you have ever played D&D, or any other table top game involving mini-figs you will have a better idea of just how tall the cake is. Also, I have put the original picture that inspired me next to it for a comparison. If you happen to want some there is another un-eaten cake currently.Hope you enjoyed this week's cake! 

 

The great cake challenge

     Hello again wonderful, brave readers. I have been lax about updating my blog of late, much has happened but I am writing now to tell you about a challenge I have set my self and think I might need a bit help with. Don't worry, your part involves eating cake. Yes, that's right, I am looking for people to eat cake and cupcakes and other sweet things, and maybe bread. Well, definitely bread because at some point I want to make bread that looks like a panda.
     The point being, I am going to attempt to make/bake/or otherwise throw together some sugary delight about once a week. Most of the things I make will be inspired by a recipe or picture that I find online which I will post here along with a picture of what I end up making. I have already chosen my first delight - a rainbow cake. See below.

     I chose this particular rainbow cake because not only do I have to dye the cake batter, but I get to dye frosting and use sprinkles as well! I have no idea what recipe was used for the cake in this picture, I am going to use a modified white cake mix with butter-cream frosting though. Hopefully I will not resort to mixes often, but this time I'm really focusing on learning how to stack a layer cake and dye frosting properly, and I may add powdered sugar clouds on top!

     Though I have chosen this week's sweet, I need help choosing for next week. So that I don't resort to dice rolling I am going to post three to five pictures every week (there will be some underlying theme every time of what I want to work on that week, but I will most likely have widely diverse treats) and I would love for people to vote on what they want me to make. As your motivation to cast a vote - I will attempt to make at least enough to feed those who do vote, regardless of whether yours is the top choice that week.
     Hopefully I will have pictures up of my attempt at a rainbow cake sometime tomorrow night or Tuesday. Do let me know if you would like a bit!