And the winner is . . . Coupcake d’etat!

They had a baking contest at work today. Of course when we heard about it, my girls and I, we had to enter it. And of course we had to enter the cupcake category (there were 4 other categories as well). With some help from hubby (he gave me the basic idea and I made it into something tangible), we developed the Coupcake d’etat: overthrowing your traditional idea of a cupcake.

The Coupcake d’etat consists of a chocolate cupcake injected with nutella. Into the injection hole, we stick some rolled up crepe. We fill the crepe with nutella, put a banana around it and dust with powdered sugar.

For the contest we had to make 200 of these little guys. It took 3 hours the night before (last night) and 1 hour today (last minute prep–we wanted to put the bananas on as late as possible so they didn’t oxidize too much). Fortunately we were paired up with an amazing chef who stuck with us the whole time.

And the end result? We won!!!! We were totally proud of ourselves and had a great time. The competition was stiff–we had some awesome red velvet cupcakes next to us. They were really good. We would have had a great time had we not won. But it was pretty cool that we won, too 🙂 What did we win? $50 each to Williams-Sonoma to further our baking endeavors.

Here are some pics from the making and baking.

This was the tester that I made on Sunday to test the recipes. We used Martha Stewart’s One Bowl Chocolate Cupcakes recipe for the base and the Cooks Illustrated recipe for the sweet crepes.

For making the batters, we had some pretty industrial equipment. On the left, an immersion blender for the crepe batter. It seriously looks like you could edge your lawn with this thing. It even had a safety switch. On the right, the mixing bowl. I have no idea how many gallons this was. But the mixer itself was bigger than our heads and it had a safety grate you put over the bowl to keep fingers out. As one of my teammates put it, “You could bathe a baby in that!”