Even More Baking: Cupcakes!

At Halloween, I saw an idea for mummy cupcakes, so I decided to try a new (to me) dark chocolate cupcake recipe.

I found one at the Brown Eyed Baker blog here.  For these, I used only her cupcake recipe and the Bouchon Bakery recipe for basic buttercream, my favorite buttercream of all time.  Unfortunately, I realized after making the cupcakes and butterream that although I did have Wilton eyeballs on hand (who doesn't?), I didn't have the right sort of tip to create the strips of bandage.  I tried winging it with a round tip and squishing down, but it wasn't quite as precise as I'd have liked.  I've since bought a flat tip for next year, because the cupcakes were definitely good.  And they were cute, they'll just be cuter when done right.

Meanwhile, back in September I was cast in the early December production of Snew White, obviously a takeoff on Snow White, at the Studioplayhouse in Montclair.  I played Evelyn Crabtree, assistant to the Evil Queen.  I figured, what with working with the Evil Queen and all, that it'd be fitting for me to go with a poison apple theme.  So I decided almost immediately that I'd do apple cake pops.  I have Bakerella's book and had done pops just once before, for a Mardi Gras party years ago.  To stay with the theme, I set out to find a good apple cake recipe to use for these pops.

This apple cupcake with brown sugar buttercream (I've determined that I really prefer buttercream that uses zero confectioner's sugar) recipe I found looked just about right, but I needed to test them for both taste and texture.  I made them first as cupcakes for a book club meeting, and they were a complete hit.  Somewhat more like dense muffins than cupcakes, they were really tasty and actually about as healthy as cupcakes are going to get, what with the 4 cups of apples in them!

Test successful.

All that remained was to make them into cake pops for my cast party on December 15.  Yeah, right.  I hit my first stumbling block in searching for the jumbo green diamond sprinkles that Bakerella suggests for a "leaf" on each apple.  Would you believe Wilton discontinued those?  Why on earth, with someone as popular as Bakerella pushing their use in her books and on her blog, why on earth, I ask you, would Wilton discontinue them?!  And I couldn't find anything truly comparable.  Finally, I found Wilton's sugar gems and spent quite a bit of time sorting through them to find the most leaf-like ones.

I was even good about it.  I made the cupcakes that Friday evening and the buttercream Saturday morning.  Saturday after our afternoon performances, I went home, crumbled the cupcakes, mashed in the buttercream, and formed 40-something little cake apples on parchment paper.  Into the fridge they went for the requisite time period, while I got my sticks, "leaves," and pretzel "stems" ready and dug out my candy melts.

Candy melts.  Ha.  A misnomer if I ever heard one.  I had (note:  had) a good number of red candy melts.  Tried to melt them.  Failed.  Decided my apples would be pale green.  Tried my green & white candy melts.  Better luck, but not by much.  I ended up with a candy melt paste that I had to spackle on to each "apple," which therefore no longer actually looked like apples, after I spent all that time shaping them into cute little apple shapes.  Ugh.  Sticks, candy melt spackle, pretzel stick stems, and after an even 40 I gave up.  I was exhausted, disheartened, and annoyed.  Why can Bakerella get her melts to hit a nice liquid and mine were a mess?  It's not like I've never melted chocolate before.  I make chocolate candies, for pete's sake.  I even tried adding a little vegetable oil based on a tip I found online, and it did very little.  Plus, I think that's kind of gross.

If any of you have any ideas, let me know, because I'm about ready to never make a cake pop again as long as I live.  If I ever do succumb and make another pop, I'm only using good chocolate to coat them, and the heck with cutesy shapes and colors.  I just can't do it.  Notice I'm not providing a photo of my pops.  There aren't any.  No way, no how.

Meanwhile, my fellow cast members & the show's crew loved them.  Of course.  Thought they were adorable and delicious.  Delicious, I agree.  Adorable?  Go figure.  One fellow actor actually said that I have a great "go to" when I get invited anywhere.  Hahahahahahaha!  Obviously, they looked easy and low-labor.

But I promised cupcakes in this post, so enough about my semi-failed/semi-successful cake pops, and on to more cupcakes!

My office holiday party.

I made that Bouchon Bakery tart.  But it just so happens that there is one single, solitary woman in the office who's allergic to hazelnuts.  Of course.  The one nut in the tart is her one allergy.  Sigh.  So I had to make something else as well.  I went back to the Brown Eyed Baker's dark chocolate cupcakes, but this time I topped them with Bouchon Bakery's peanut butter buttercream, the recipe for the filling in Sebastien Rouxel's Better Nutters.  Wow.  Rich and... well, rich... and wow.  Again, a hit.

I may complain and I may wear myself out, but I really do love baking.  I promise.

As Promised, Plum Kuchen

With recipe!

When I first mentioned making plum kuchen as an additional dessert for Eric's birthday, I got some quizzical looks.  Kuchen is a German word, after all, and not everyone knows what it is.  When I went online to try and show people, though, I discovered for the very first time that what I know as plum kuchen is not necessarily what others know as plum kuchen.  There were so many photos of cakes that looked nothing like my mom's version, and just as many different recipes to go with them!  I had no idea it wasn't a thing, but a variety of things.

My mom's version, the one I make, isn't actually a cake.  It's more of a plum pie or tart, in a delicious buttery crust.  And it requires Italian prune plums, which are only in season for about a half a minute in September.  For the last several years, I'd actually thought of it immediately after they were out of the supermarkets, and missed the season entirely.  This year, I thought of it early and made sure I kept an eye out... and when we were shopping for ingredients for the Bouchon Bakery tart, there they were!  My prune plums!

I snapped them up, stashed them in the fridge, and waited for Eric's birthday to roll around so I could share one of my very favorite desserts with our friends.

The Crust

For the crust, you need:

1 cup flour
1 tbsp sugar
1/3 cup butter
1 egg yolk
2 tbsp water
1.5 tbsp lemon juice

Mix all ingredients and press into pie plate.  Chill.

My one mistake here was not bringing the crust quite high enough in the pie plate.  You want it all the way up the edge.

The Filling

For the filling you need:

2 lbs of prune plums (about 24)
3/4 cup sugar
2 tbsp flour

Mix the flour and sugar together, and spread half in the bottom of the crust.  Cut plums in half and circle tightly in the pie, alternating the direction of each concentric circle.

Pour the remaining sugar/flour mixture evenly over the plums.

Bake 50 minutes at 400 degrees.  And you get...

Utter deliciousness!  (and if you make the crust as high as you should, the juice won't pool around the edges like that)

I've Been Baking

Boy, have I!  I need to backtrack to September at this point, because of how much I haven't told you.

September was Eric's birthday, so of course I baked for that party.  And he had a request.  An intimidating, fairly arduous request.  He wanted a Praline and Cocoa Nib Tart from the Bouchon Bakery cookbook he got me for our anniversary last March.  If you don't know, the Bouchon Bakery is owned by Thomas Keller and run by executive pastry chef Sebastien Rouxel.  These are some big shoes to fill.  Huge.

That one little 8" tart required five different recipes to make.  And with French pastries, apparently, everything is a process.  Freezing for hours in between steps.  Baking, turning, baking some more.  And with Thomas Keller and Sebastien Rouxel specifically, some interesting ingredients!

I'm a baker.  I've been a baker since I was a kid.  I come from a line of bakers, my mom won first prize for her French apple pie and her mother actually baked for schools.  Her sister, my aunt, baked for diners.  So I know my way around a canister of flour.  But trimoline?  (Invert sugar)  Glucose?  (Another form of sugar that's honestly a royal pain to work with; it's a stiff goo)  Cocoa butter?  (Good thing we make soap and our cocoa butter is food grade, since this is not easy to find at the supermarket!)  Hazelnut-almond praline paste.  (Huh?)  64% dark chocolate.  (Specifically 64%.  Did you know you can't find that in the supermarket?  Not even Fairway.  They've got 62%.  and 70%.  No 64%.  Damnit.)  And Feuilletine.  (WTH?)

Yeah.  Well, it's a good thing Eric's into molecular gastronomy because he got a good chuckle as I placed my first order with one of "his" websites to get this stuff.  At least I could find European butter, 40% milk chocolate, blanched hazelnuts, cocoa nibs, unsweetened cocoa powder, almond flour, and everything else I needed at one or the other of the two supermarkets I tried.

But Feuilletine?  Ha.  I tried Fairway, which has a stellar baking section, and is where I found the vanilla paste (as opposed to extract) for my foray into making Sebastien Rouxel's Better Nutters over the summer.  I tried calling a local restaurant supply store.  I tried local French bakeries to see if I could either buy it from them or get hooked up with their supplier.

Nothing.

Finally, I found a recipe for it online.  It's a pain to make, but holy crow, is it good.  It's kind of like crumbled up chocolate sugar cone, but better.  It just takes forever to spread really, really thin and bake just a couple pans at a time, since the recipe makes a ton.  On the bright side, the recipe makes a ton, and the tart recipe only calls for 60 grams of it, so I saved the rest in a cereal tupperware wa silica packet to keep it dry and crunchy.  For the record, feuilletine is also excellent on ice cream.

So that was recipe #1.

Then came the tart crust, called pate sucre.  It's amazing, and tastes a lot like shortbread.  Really, really great shortbread.  Recipe #2.

The base of the tart is a praline, and that's where the feuilletine comes in; it's an ingredient in the praline.  Yes, I spent hours making an ingredient.  Recipe #3.

And then the chocolate ganache.  That's where we get to the glucose, trimoline, and 64% dark chocolate.  Wow.  Recipe #4.

Then, the dentelle.  Crushed toasted blanched hazelnuts, cocoa nibs, and other goodness that turns into a crunchy crust.  Finally, Recipe #5.

The best way to make this tart, I've determined, is over the course of several days, in parts.  The dough needs to be frozen before and after being rolled out.  The praline needs to be frozen too.  So, yeah.  Days is best, unless you're getting up at 6 a.m. to start and serving it late at night.

So worth it.  So.  Freakin'.  Worth it.

I've done it twice since.  The pate sucre recipe is enough for two tarts and can be frozen for a month, so I used the other half of this first batch on a second tart for our Halloween party.

And then I made another batch, and brought the third tart to my office holiday party last Friday.  I don't think I need to explain what a hit it was.

The one thing that gets me is that when I roll out the pate sucre nice and smooth and lay it nicely on the cookie sheet in the tart ring, I roll over it, and get a beautiful, flat, even edge for my tart.  But then I've got to blind bake it before putting in the praline and ganache, so I follow Rouxel's instruction to use parchment paper filled with rice so it holds its shape.  The only problem with that is that parchment paper is crinkly and the dough is soft.  The paper mars the dough and ruins my nice, even edge!

Oh, geez.  As I was typing this, about to ask for input, I realized I should freeze the dough before doing that.  Frozen dough won't be marred by the parchment paper when it goes in the oven!  Don't mind me, I'm running a little behind in the brain cell department these days.  I plan to do the 4th tart for my book club meeting in January if I can get more hazelnut-almond praline paste and cocoa nibs, both of which I've used up.  I'll definitely let you know how it goes.

And my next post?  Plum Kuchen!

How We Do Halloween

We generally throw a big Halloween party, since it's my favorite holiday, and this year we were able to do it right.  First, we decorated outside.  At the new house, though, we really need more outdoor decorations.  While what we've got worked very well in the tiny, ivy-covered front yard at the old place, our new expanse of lawn requires something more impressive.

This one's my favorite.  I got it at a craft show a couple years ago, and it's handmade.  My only lament is that I no longer have the artist's card so I can't find him to get more of his stuff.

We also had strobe lights, fog machines, and thunder sound effects hiding behind the bushes and scarecrow there.

My biggest lament was that all of this was out for the party on the 27th but had to come in before actual Halloween on the 31st because of the impending storm.  The storm is a post for another day.

For now, the inside of the house.

We took the regular lights from the bathroom and replaced them with blacklight bulbs and candles, a dim, spooky setting for the raven & mirror ghost.

With the overhead light replaced with a blacklight bulb, this reaper at the end of the hall was pretty creepy.

We didn't do much in the guest room, but I love how Nemo is side-eyeing the witch.

The kitchen kept its lights for drink mixing and pumpkin soup making.

I made these creepy apothecary bottles several years ago.  They're filled with things like Jellyfish Stingers (hot glue strings), Hair of Werewolf (dog hair), Swamp Fog (pulled cotton ball), and Toe of Demon (cut pieces of red taper candle).

The whole dining room and living room were lit by string lights, candles, and lighted decorations.  That lit Jack o' Lantern on a cat's back on the floor was my very first Halloween decoration, the one my mom put in our front window when I was a kid.

I love that death candelabra in the middle of the table.

These masks are actually my year-round dining room decor.

That blue skeleton is painted with blacklight paint.  The lamp has blacklight bulbs in it.  I did the shade years ago, with black paper bats and lightning streaks drawn on in highlighter so they glow when it's lit too.

The African mask is also year-round decor.  I "won" it at a charity auction.

One of my favorite things is that witch all the way on the left.  She's beautifully made, with poison apples in her sling, even.

I suddenly realized I have quite a few gargoyles.

This skeleton was actually the prop of the winner of best costume.  The prize is that gold glitter pumpkin.  He showed up in a suit with a briefcase and the skeleton, claiming to be a medical malpractice attorney with his unfortunate client.

Another favorite, my Nightmare Before Christmas tree.

And the cooler, which was out back.  Can't go wrong with a blow up coffin!

How do you do Halloween?