January 28, 2014

Chocolate cupcakes with crispy magic frosting

Once again, this recipe comes from Joanne Chang's cookbook, Flour.  Is it getting old to say that these cupcakes were fantastic?


One of the reasons why I think I'm having so much success when baking from this book, aside from the recipes being good, is that the directions are so precise.  The recipes might be several pages long, but each step is spelled out so that you know exactly what you should be doing, what it should look like, what you should look out for.


I had to do an emergency substitution in the recipe.  I do this thing where I think I have all the ingredients I need, then when I go to bake, I don't.  Oops.  It happened again.  This time I'm glad I didn't have all the chocolate I needed.  I only had one ounce of semisweet chocolate, and I needed two.  Luckily, I still had mint infused chocolate, so I used an ounce of that.  YUM.  The cupcakes ended up with a nice minty flavor.


So, yes, these cupcakes were delicious.  I would have rather piped the icing on top, but my star tip is smaller than I remembered.  I used a small offset spatula instead.  The icing was thick and hard to spread on a delicate cupcake, but it was good.  It definitely would have been easier to pipe it- and it would have looked much better.  It was a Swiss buttercream icing, which means that I made a Swiss meringue first (heated egg whites and sugar over a bain marie before beating into marshmallowy whiteness in a stand mixer) before adding the butter.  Good stuff. 

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