Category Archives: Desserts

Green Tea Cupcakes with Honey Frosting

Posted on February 10, 2012 by Julie • 16 Comments
Pin it

I know a lot of people believe that green tea is magical. The arguments for its numerous health benefits are pretty convincing – preventing and fighting cancer, decreasing cholesterol, reducing the risk of heart disease, clearing up skin, and fighting obesity? Sounds pretty good. So what do you do when you have a packet of powdered green tea, chock full of antioxidants and just waiting to help you lose your winter weight and lower your cholesterol?

You use it to make cupcakes, of course.

Yes, I’m aware that converting green tea into a baked good does a pretty good job of negating all the positive things it can do for you. Counterpoint: cupcakes.

I think we all know who’s winning this debate. Cupcakes always win.

With cold season in full swing, I wanted these to be as close to a warm, comforting mug of tea as you can get in a cupcake – and honestly, it was so close that after tasting these, I wondered for a minute why I hadn’t just brewed myself a cup of green tea and called it a day. This is definitely a subtle, grown-up cupcake, but that’s not to its detriment at all. The fresh, slightly grassy flavor of matcha powder* is balanced perfectly by the tartness of lemon, and the light-as-air Swiss meringue buttercream allows the distinctive sweetness of honey to shine through without being lost under cups of powdered sugar. They may not cure cancer or lower your cholesterol, but I’d argue that they reveal a whole new layer of green tea’s benefits.

*Matcha powder is dried, powdered green tea – it can be found at most Asian supermarkets or specialty tea shops. It’s also great in smoothies and ice cream.

Green Tea, Lemon, and Honey Cupcakes
Yield: about 20 cupcakes

Ingredients:
For the Cupcakes:
2 1/2 cups cake flour
1 1/4 cups sugar
1 Tbsp baking powder
1 tsp kosher or sea salt
2 Tbsp matcha powder
1 cup milk or half-and-half
2 large eggs, at room temperature
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1 1/2 tsp lemon extract

For the Frosting:
4 large egg whites
1 1/4 cup granulated sugar
3 sticks unsalted butter, room temperature
1/4 cup raw honey (I used raw because I think the taste is more pronounced, but any honey is fine)

Instructions:
Make the Cupcakes:
Preheat oven to 350 F. Line 2 muffin pans with paper liners and set aside (note that this recipe makes about 20 cupcakes, so line your pans accordingly).

Sift cake flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, and matcha powder into a medium bowl. In a larger bowl or the bowl of a stand mixer, beat milk, eggs, oil, and lemon extract on medium speed until completely incorporated. Add the dry ingredients and beat on medium speed until fully mixed, about 2 minutes. Divide batter evenly among lined pans, filling about 2/3 full. Bake for 16-18 minutes, until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Cool in pans for five minutes, then remove to racks to cool completely.

Make the Frosting:
Fill a medium saucepan with about 2 inches of water. Bring to a simmer over medium heat. Whisk egg whites and sugar together in the bowl of a stand mixer. Place bowl over saucepan, whisking constantly until sugar is completely dissolved and the mixture is white and glossy (note: to completely pasteurize the egg whites, they must be heated to 140 degrees).

Remove mixer bowl from heat. Using the whisk attachment, beat on high speed until cooled and the egg whites hold stiff peaks, about 8 minutes. Switch to the paddle attachment and add the butter two tablespoons at a time. Beat until fluffy and smooth, about 3-5 minutes, or longer if necessary. Have a mild emotional breakdown when it appears your frosting has curdled and is ruined. Celebrate wildly when it comes back together. Beat your chest in victory. Add the honey and continue beating until incorporated.

Frost cupcakes and dust with a light sprinkling of matcha powder. Enjoy with or without a steaming mug of freshly brewed green tea.

Filed Under: Desserts

Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Cupcakes

Posted on February 5, 2012 by Julie • 5 Comments
Pin it

Before I say anything about these cupcakes, before I tell you how to make them, before I go on and on about just how delicious they are (and oh, they are delicious), I’m going to hand out one piece of preemptive advice: these are best eaten on a treadmill.

I’m not one to wax poetic about the joys of butter. Yes, I use it. It is what it is. But I don’t buy it in bulk (well, unless there’s a really good sale) and I do make a cursory effort to exercise relative moderation.

That said, we’re talking dessert here. Some desserts are so incredibly, ridiculously over-the-top good, that they’re worth the occasional splurge. This is one of those desserts. It’s every beater you snuck from the mixing bowl and ran into the next room to lick clean when your mom wasn’t looking.  It’s every spoonful of raw cookie dough that won the mental battle between potential salmonella and guaranteed bliss. It’s every chocolate chip cookie you grabbed from the cookie sheet and bit into when it was still almost too hot to eat. Simply put, it’s nostalgia, decadence,  indulgence, and eye-rolling flavor, all rolled into one cupcake that’s worth whatever extra calories it throws your way. Just this once. Or twice.

This cupcake holds a special place in my heart – I come from a family of cookie dough fiends, and I can’t even count the occasions when a cold brick of slice-and-bake chocolate chip cookie dough has made its way onto the table as dessert over the years. We would all grab spoons and crowd around the dough log until nothing was left but the sticky wrapper and the tacit acknowledgment that no one would ever know what we’d done (um…sorry, guys).  Having this cupcake in the repertoire both brings back those fond memories and ensures that our shameful dough binging will never happen again. With a rich brown-sugar chocolate chip cupcake filled with a dollop of eggless cookie dough  (buh-bye, salmonella fears, even though I always ignored you), topped with a slightly grainy cookie dough buttercream and a miniature chocolate chip cookie, I think we can officially put our days of sneaking raw cookie dough to bed.

Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Cupcakes
Yield: 24 cupcakes

Ingredients:
Cupcakes:
2 2/3 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. baking soda
¼ tsp. salt
3 sticks unsalted butter, at room temperature
1½ cups packed light brown sugar
4 large eggs, at room temperature
1 cup milk
2 tsp. vanilla extract
1 cup chocolate chips (semisweet or bittersweet)

Filling:
4 tbsp. unsalted butter, at room temperature
6 tbsp. light brown sugar, packed
1 cup all-purpose flour
7 oz. sweetened condensed milk
½ tsp. vanilla extract
¼ cup mini semisweet chocolate chips

Frosting:
3 sticks unsalted butter, room temperature
¾ cup packed light brown sugar
3 cups confectioners’ sugar
1 cup all-purpose flour
¾ tsp. salt
3 tbsp. half and half or cream
2 tsp. vanilla extract

Extras:
Mini chocolate chips
Mini chocolate chip cookies (unabashed admission that I buy these at Trader Joe’s. These are time-consuming enough as it is - the recipe source links to a recipe you can use if you want to make them from scratch)

Instructions:

Make the Filling:
Combine butter and brown sugar in a bowl or stand mixer and cream on medium speed until light and fluffy. Add flour, sweetened condensed milk, and vanilla. Beat until well-incorporated, about a minute. Cover and refrigerate until ready to use.

Make the Cupcakes:
Preheat oven to 350 F. Line two 12-cup muffin tins with paper liners and set aside.

Combine flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt in a medium bowl and set aside.

Using a hand mixer or in the bowl of a stand mixer, cream butter and brown sugar on medium speed until light and fluffy (2-3 minutes). Beat in eggs one at a time, scraping down the sides of the bowl after each addition. Add the dry ingredients and milk in alternating additions, beginning and ending with the dry ingredients. Beat in vanilla, then fold in chocolate chips with a spatula.

Scoop batter into prepared tins, filling about 2/3 to 3/4 full. Bake for 17-19 minutes, until tops spring back lightly when touched. Cool in pans for five minutes, then transfer to wire racks to cool completely.

Make the Frosting:
Beat butter and brown sugar in a mixing bowl or stand mixer until light and fluffy (since you’ve already done this twice for this recipe, I assume you’ve got the hang of it). Mix in the powdered sugar, 1/2 cup at a time, until well-incorporated. Beat in flour and salt until smooth. Mix in cream and vanilla until smooth and fluffy.

Assemble:
Using a paring knife, cut a well into the center of each cupcake. Dispose of the cupcake middles by placing in your mouth, chewing, and swallowing. Scoop some of the cookie dough filling into each cupcake. Frost the cupcakes and top with mini chocolate chips and a mini cookie.

Source: Annie’s Eats.

Filed Under: Desserts

Red Velvet Cupcakes

Posted on January 21, 2012 by Julie • 13 Comments
Pin it


Whenever a friend or coworker has a birthday, I send out my cupcake menu and ask them to choose a flavor so I can give them a custom half-dozen for their special day. I also tell them that they’re free to suggest something entirely different if they have a favorite flavor they don’t see, or a beloved dessert that I might be able to recreate as a cupcake. I love this, because it challenges me to get outside my comfort zone and try new things, and it’s the main reason there are now almost forty flavors on my cupcake menu. It’s how key lime, tiramisu, and cream soda cupcakes went from crazy ideas to crowd favorites, and it’s why the list continues to grow. The best part is that it makes people happy to see a brand new flavor come to life purely from a fond childhood memory – it feels like a meeting of the minds, a joint effort, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I have a friend, though, who recently reminded me of something equally important, if not more so – that not everything enjoyable has to be exotic, or new, or particularly adventuresome. For her birthday, without even looking at the cupcake menu (I’m actually not even sure I even had to send it), she immediately chose red velvet for the third year in a row, noting that she “prefers the classics.” I jotted down her selection, made a note on my calendar, and didn’t think more about it until the night before our get-together earlier this week.

That night, I’d gotten stuck in two hours of traffic after a long day at work. Cranky and exhausted, I flipped the television to the classic rock station as I began preheating the oven, lining my cupcake pans, and rearranging the kitchen so I could plug in the mixer (yes, I actually have to reconfigure about half of my kitchen to plug various appliances into the one electrical outlet that’s not behind the refrigerator. We’ll discuss that another time). As I continued to prep, I began to notice something.

Slowly but surely, I was relaxing. Decompressing. Unwinding.

My trudging plod across the kitchen was getting lighter, and I even felt myself beginning to move a little to the music (Night Moves, for the record). As I spooned flour and sugar into measuring cups and began sifting, I realized that this felt so good and comforting and perfect because it was so wonderfully familiar and uncomplicated. I knew this recipe by heart. I didn’t need to perch my laptop precariously atop the microwave, or frantically triple-check to make sure I hadn’t mixed up baking powder and baking soda. All I needed to do was allow my mind to wander and let my hands do the work they’d done hundreds of times before. By the time I slid the pans into the oven and curled up on the couch to wait for the unmistakable signal they were almost done (that blissful scent of freshly baked cake in the air), I’d completely forgotten about the hellish ride home and the long day that preceded it.

That’s a gift. And it’s a gift that new, exciting, probably delicious but undeniably demanding experiments just can’t give. There are so many wonderful things about those – they’re challenging, they’re different, they make us feel accomplished. But often, we (ahem, I) get so caught up in variety, and making sure we’re branching out enough (whatever “enough” means to each of us) that we forget about those little things that have always made us happy, that we tend to push aside in favor of whatever’s newer and bigger and faster and better. I know I’m headed down Metaphor Avenue and taking the first right onto the Tired Cliche cul de sac, but that evening earlier this week of music and muscle memory and tension melting away reminded me how important it is to acknowledge the joy in the familiar – and that sometimes you just need to stop and smell the red velvet.

Red Velvet Cupcakes
Yield: 24 cupcakes

Ingredients:
For the cake:
2 1/2 cups cake flour
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 tsp baking soda
1 Tbsp cocoa powder
1 tsp kosher or sea salt
2 eggs, room temperature
Scant 1 1/2 cups vegetable oil
1 cup buttermilk, room temperature
2 Tbsp red food coloring
1 tsp distilled white vinegar
1 tsp vanilla extract

For the frosting:
1/2 lb cream cheese
1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter
1/8 cup light brown sugar, packed
4 cups confectioner’s sugar, sifted
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 Tbsp heavy cream

Instructions:
Preheat oven to 350 F. Line two cupcake pans with paper liners and set aside.

In a medium bowl, sift together flour, sugar, baking soda, cocoa powder and salt.

In a larger bowl or the bowl of a stand mixer, beat together eggs, oil, buttermilk, food coloring, vanilla, and vinegar until combined (about two minutes). Add the dry ingredients in two additions and beat on medium speed until each addition is incorporated. The batter will be liquidy.

Fill the cupcake liners about 2/3 full and bake for 18-20 minutes (until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean). Let cool in pans for five minutes. Remove to racks to cool completely.

To make the frosting, beat the cream cheese on medium-high speed until light and fluffy, about a minute. Add the butter and beat until combined and fluffy, about two minutes, scraping down the sides of the bowl as necessary. Add the brown sugar, salt, and vanilla and beat to incorporate.

With the mixer on low, add the powdered sugar one cup at a time, beating each addition until well-incorporated and scraping down the sides of the bowl as necessary. Add the cream and beat on medium-high until light and fluffy.

Frost the cupcakes, and then clean red food coloring off everything you’ve ever owned (it has a way). Serve immediately or keep refrigerated in a tightly closed container for up to three days. Bring to room temperature before serving.

Source: Cake recipe adapted from Cake Man Raven, frosting adapted from Joy the Baker

Filed Under: Desserts

Salted Nutella Sandwich Cookies

Posted on January 14, 2012 by Julie • 8 Comments
Pin it

I have a cookie problem.

Not that kind of cookie problem, the kind where you pick up a bag of Chips Ahoy or a sleeve of Oreos and can’t stop eating them (okay, so I might also have that kind of cookie problem). My real, currently pressing cookie problem is that I just cannot seem to master correct baking times. Without fail, even following a recipe, my fear of underbaking takes over and I end up putting them back in and erring too far the other way. This only happens with cookies. Cupcakes? Pies? No problem. But if you’re going to call yourself any kind of baker, you have to be able to conquer the cookie. Cookies are the Taylor Swift of desserts. They’re sweet, they don’t make trouble, and there’s enough variety there that everyone likes them, even those who pretend they don’t. I like them too, maybe even love them – we’re not quite there yet – but I’m held back by the fact that cookies continue to be my kitchen kryptonite (real-life kryptonite: laundry). Allow me to illustrate for you how a typical cookie-baking session shakes out in my home:

  1. Timer dings. I eagerly open the door to my waiting sheets of perfectly set cookies.
  2. Wet, gooey dough piles stare back at me.
  3. I keep my cool and set the timer for three more minutes.
  4. Timer dings. I check again. Still unset blobs. Tentatively poke one and watch the indentation my finger made collapse into the cookie. Set the timer for two more minutes.
  5. Timer dings. Oven contains dozens of leaden, rock-like discs staring up at me. Are they…are they taunting me?
  6. Profanity.

The above is pretty much status quo when I make cookies, although I downplayed the swearing for you. I like to think that my complete ineptitude at cookie-making keeps me humble. The other upside is that this particular time, what seemed like an inevitable cookie disaster resulted in these fantastic sandwich cookies, which are positively teeming with Nutella (Italian for “chocolate hazelnut crack”).

When I once again slightly overcooked my cookies, I heaved a big sigh (after plenty of Step 6: Profanity, of course) and vowed to grin and bear it. I will not remake these just to prove that I can do it right, I repeated to myself over and over. But I had to do something - we had friends coming over to watch football, and I couldn’t bear the thought of sending them home with cookie bricks, especially if our Steelers lost (they did – curse you, Tim Tebow). The flavor was great, but they needed something that could counteract the crunch. So I hoisted my leftover half-jar of Nutella and spread a thick layer on a cookie, then topped it with another cookie and took a bite – and there it was. Alone, these cookies were just a little too crunchy to enjoy as a standalone cookie – but surrounding that creamy layer of Nutella from both sides, with the savory hint from the sea salt, they worked. Oh, did they work.

I’m learning to accept that I may never conquer the cookie, but they’ve certainly taught me to make the best of a bad situation. And I’ll take a life lesson over baking perfection any day.*

*False. I would prefer baking perfection.

Salted Nutella Sandwich Cookies
Yield: about two dozen cookies, or 12 sandwiches

Ingredients
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/3 cup cocoa powder
1 tsp baking powder
1 stick unsalted butter, room temperature
1 cup granulated sugar
1 tsp vanilla
1/3 cup Nutella or other chocolate-hazelnut spread
1/3 cup milk
Coarse sea salt for sprinkling

Instructions
Preheat oven to 325 F. Line cookie sheets with parchment paper.

In a medium bowl, whisk the flour, cocoa powder, and baking powder together to combine.

With a hand or stand mixer, cream the butter and sugar together until pale and fluffy, about 3 minutes. Mix in the vanilla and Nutella and beat until smooth, about one more minute.

Add the flour mixture and milk alternately in two additions. Beat until just combined. Cover the cookie dough and chill in the refrigerator for 20 minutes.

Roll cookie dough into one-and-a-half inch balls with your fingers and place two inches apart on baking sheets. Flatten the balls very slightly and sprinkle with the coarse sea salt.

Bake 15-17 minutes, until set. Note: if you want these chewier to serve plain, bake for 12-15 minutes.

Allow to cool on baking sheets for five minutes, then transfer to racks to cool completely.

When completely cooled, slather the middle of each cookie with a generous dollop of Nutella and top with another cookie. Pat yourself on the back for your salvaging efforts and treat yourself to one immediately.

Source: Cookie recipe from Sugarcrafter.

Filed Under: Desserts