Let’s discuss my shortcomings. Or rather, let’s discuss ONE of my shortcomings, because we’ll need stuff to talk about in the future and I don’t have that many.
Humility, apparently, should be added to the list, but that’s not the one we’re talking about today.
The one we’re talking about today is my complete disorganization in all aspects of my life, specifically with grocery shopping. I make my list, spend about five minutes in the store halfheartedly attempting to stick to it, and then ripping it into tiny, confetti-like shreds, tossing it into the air, and running down the aisles with both arms out, theatrically sweeping everything that isn’t meat into my cart. I have fragmented thoughts of half-recipes while I’m doing it (“Coconut milk! We can have curry tomorrow! Butternut squash! I can make ravioli! Oh, white chocolate chips! I need those for…something.”). Then I get home and am confronted with the cold reality that I don’t have any curry paste to go with the coconut milk, I don’t know how to make ravioli, and I already have four bags of white chocolate chips – and I still can’t remember what I desperately needed them for.
For the past couple of years, I’ve done this thing at work where I try to make special cupcakes for everyone on my team’s birthday. They pick a flavor off of my menu and get a half-dozen to take home, and the rest of the batch is for everyone to enjoy. This was really easy when I was on a six-person team, slightly more difficult when we kept adding on new people and eventually got into the double digits – and on top of that, they ALL have summer birthdays. Seriously. I think there’s maybe one November, but June, July, and August are teeming with coworker birthdays.
This shouldn’t really matter since I switched projects in April and am again on a much smaller team, but none of the people on my new team like sweets. Besides, after three-plus years on the old team, I kinda still liked them, so I try to keep up.
Try is the operative word. I’m currently between two and three months behind. Whoops.
These, for example, were for a June birthday. And this coworker does not order from my menu. I’m not even sure she looks at it. She gives me a list of flavors that she likes and my job is to make magic happen. If I were a bad friend, I’d pick two flavors that don’t remotely go together. But I’m not a bad friend, and she is an excellent friend who deserves magic cupcakes (maybe even more than once a year), so she gets Bailey’s and chocolate instead of peanut butter and orange. And she also gets the added bonus of feeling like she’s having a drink at work – Lord knows we all need that sometimes.
These are now on the menu for good – they’re such a fun departure from a standard cupcake. Dense, rich, and creamy, one at a time is all you’ll need, but you’ll definitely be back for more. And you’ll be sending silent thank yous to my coworker Elizabeth for inspiring a new addition to the repertoire for the second year in a row.
Cadbury egg recipes have been flying around the blogosphere this spring, and each time I see one, I have a little mantra I recite to myself as I frantically click the back button: “I will not make this. I will not make this.” Every day it’s gotten more and more difficult to click away, and today I cracked. I blame these creme egg brownies for pushing me over the edge. I was able to resist all of the recipes that called for scraping out creme egg middles, because it just looked like such a pain, but Lindsay’s super-easy homemade filling took away both the annoying prep work and the suspect ingredients. How could I turn away? I went straight to the kitchen before I even had time to feel ashamed of my fleeting willpower (or lack thereof).
These cupcakes are extremely rich and very sweet. Stuffed with homemade creme filling and topped with chocolate frosting and a Cadbury mini egg, one is definitely enough. I had actually wanted to top these with a thin layer of ganache rather than a buttercream, since the centers are so decadent, but I had no heavy cream on hand and no car – and frankly, rich isn’t always a downside.
I promise this will be my last blood orange recipe (well…I take that back – there might be one more. Or maybe two). Citrus season in the non-citrus parts of the country seems to fly by, although that’s probably all in my head since I feel the same way about brussels sprout season and artichoke season. I try to make the most of the few weeks where blood oranges are at the forefront of the grocery shelves, full of flavor and promising a fleeting but memorable experience. I also wanted to do something special with the last of my blood orange curd, and in my house, cupcakes = special.
Chocolate/orange is one of my all-time favorite flavor combinations. When I was younger, my uncle and grandmother would send a huge box of gifts down from upstate New York at Christmastime. I always looked forward to that box arriving, first and foremost because I was an extremely greedy child, but also because somewhere within the wrapped treats was always a Terry’s Chocolate Orange for each of us. I loved cracking the round foil ball on the table before unwrapping it and watching it break into segments, almost as much as I loved the rich chocolaty burst followed by a hint of bright citrus. I haven’t had a Terry’s in years, but I still veer directly to chocolate when I’m trying to figure out what to pair with oranges.
I used my go-to chocolate cupcake recipe for this, which is just Hershey’s Perfectly Chocolate Cake in cupcake form. This is my absolute favorite chocolate cupcake recipe - it’s rich, moist, delicious, and (most importantly) incredibly easy to make. Perking it up with a bit of blood orange zest adds a whole new element, and the tart blood orange cream cheese frosting puts it completely over the top. I loved these so much that I’m going to go scour the grocery stores for more blood oranges so I can squeeze these in a few more times before blood oranges go all unseasonal on me.
I don’t do much frying. Largely because, you know, it’s bad for you, but if I’m being 100% honest, there’s a pretty big laziness factor thrown in there. I never know how to best dispose of the oil, and I hate dealing with the greasy stack of paper towels left from draining. And I can’t stand that oily film that deep-frying seems to leave on your skin, your clothes, and half your kitchen.
I’m really selling this, aren’t I?
My point is, I fried for these doughnuts. Even though I hate frying. After making blood orange curd last week, all I could do was picture it oozing prettily out of the center of a dark chocolate doughnut. I’d never made doughnuts before, but this seemed like as good a reason as any to learn.
I had some catastrophic failures making these. I’m going to detail them out, because the correctly made ones are so sublime that I need you to not make the same mistakes I did. This will allow you to enjoy a full batch of these babies instead of the roughly two-thirds of a batch I ended up with after dejectedly admitting defeat with the other third and tossing them in the garbage.
How Not to Fail at Doughnuts
Do not attempt without a deep-fry/candy thermometer. I foolishly shrugged this off, thinking “hot is hot.” This is how I lost approximately one-third of my doughnuts. The oil gets too hot, and while you’re happily waiting for your timer to go off, your poor doughnuts are burning and screaming for rescue. Since they’re chocolate, you won’t be able to tell they’re burned until after you take them out, so correct temperature + time is key.
Okay, that’s pretty much it. Seriously. Make sure your oil is the right temperature.
Did I mention thermometers yet? So, I don’t know if you’ve heard, but if your oil gets too hot you will burn your doughnuts and go to bed sad.
I know I said that was pretty much it, but I lied. Don’t try to fry in your enameled cast iron dutch oven. I began heating my shortening in there because it was already on the stove and I didn’t really think about it, but it began to make alarming crackling noises about five minutes later. A quick Google revealed that I was lucky to not have ruined it. Should I have known this? Don’t judge me.
Even with my failure and lost doughnuts, the remaining ones were 100% worth it. They’re tender and cakey, and frying them in shortening prevents an excess of oily residue after they cool (this is a great tip from Deb - fats that are solid at room temperature are better for frying because of that, and because less of it is absorbed into the food). In the end, they were so good on their own that I didn’t even fill them with the orange curd* – I just rolled them in the simple vanilla glaze from the original recipe and brought them into work to make them disappear.
*Recipe for what I actually did with the blood orange curd coming this week.
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