Well, with all that wonderful ravioli, we had to have some dessert. And since we had all sorts of cool pastry tips and glitters from shopping at the Home Cake Decorating Supply Co, we had to make cupcakes. š
I decided to make the Cooks Illustrated chocolate cake recipe from Bakers Illustrated with their buttercream frosting. I was looking forward to multiple things: 1) trying the buttercream recipe because it was one of those ones that boils eggs and then adds butter, and 2) B & D have the Professional 6 qt. KitchenAid and I was curious to try that out since I am debating what size to get for a new KitchenAid.
I was pretty set on making mint chocolate cupcakes. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find any peppermint extract. So we tried crushing our own mint to make the flavor. Needless to say this was ineffective in adding mint flavor to the cupcakes. Okay, there was a hint. But not enough that I would do it with this method again. It was kinda fun to use the mortar and pestle though.
Yummy cupcakes right out of the oven. They were a bit dense and didn’t rise as much as I expected. We think it was because of old baking soda.
To make the buttercream, you start by putting eggs in the mixer over a pot of boiling water. You want to bring the eggs to around 160 degrees or so, whisking the whole while.
Then you start whisking it with the mixer, adding the butter one chunk at a time. 2 sticks of butter! They don’t call it buttercream for nothing.
And that’s about it. Here I’m filling the giant cupcake sized pastry bag with the frosting. The frosting tasted a bit buttery for my liking, but it was much more stable than other frostings I’ve made so I might try adding more butter from now on. But certainly not that much.
Now we frost the cupcakes. The frosting is so nice and stiff! And I love the pastry tip. There were complaints that I wasn’t putting enough frosting on them so the first few (far left) are a bit sparser.
Add some sprinkles . . . (look at those perfectly formed frosting tops!)
And there you have it. Lovely finished cupcakes. You can see where I tried to fix the “sparse” ones closest to the camera. But they all tasted good enough.
