Last weekend I made Red Velvet Cupcakes as a trial run in anticipation of my sister's birthday, which is coming up on Tuesday. I promised in this post that I would make some kind of cupcake for her birthday and I know that red velvet is one of her favorite cakes, so I decided to give RV cupcakes a whirl.
I looked through a bunch of my cookbooks and searched on the Internet to see what I could find in the way of red velvetiness. I was disappointed not to find an RV recipe in The Gift of Southern Cooking by Edna Lewis and Scott Peacock. I figured if anyone would have a definitive guide to red velvet, it'd be them.
The Sweet Melissa Baking Book, which I mentioned here and here, had an RVC recipe that looked quite good. The only issues I had were that it called for 2 teaspoons of cinnamon, which didn't seem like something I'd necessarily want in my RVC batter, and it offered no advice on how to convert the cake into cupcakes. The book doesn't have any cupcake recipes at all, which is suprising to me since cupcakes are a mainstay at the Sweet Melissa bakery. Maybe Melissa is keeping them in reserve for baking book No. 2.
Anyhow, I found an RVC recipe at Epicurious that had both layer cake and cupcake variations. It's from New York's Magnolia Bakery.* Since this recipe made a cake using three 9-inch-by-2-inch circular pans and produced 24 cupcakes, I figured Sweet Melissa's would produce 16 cupcakes since it made a two-layer cake using 9x2 pans.
I was pleased with how the cupcakes turned out, and my co-workers liked them. I was mysteriously able to make 24, with some batter left over for eating right out of the bowl. And I even filled the cupcake liners almost to the tippy top. *shrugs*
Next time, when I make them for Tracey, I'll do three things differently: First, I'll leave out the cinnamon. I don't think it's found in traditional red velvets and, as Joyce and I discussed, it may have masked some of the chocolate flavor. SM's recipe has more cocoa than most of the others I considered—3 tablespoons versus as little as a teaspoon—and I want to be able to taste it. SM has a habit of doing things just a little bit different—using orange instead of the more common lemon in a poppy seed cake, for example—and I'm usually all for that. But in this case, I say nay.
I'll also allow plenty of time for the icing ingredients to soften. You whip in the butter and vanilla for less than a minute after combining the cream cheese and powdered sugar for a much longer time. My butter wasn't as soft as it should have been and so it didn't get incorporated into the icing as thoroughly as I'd wanted it to. And I was afraid of whipping it too much because the recipe specifically says "Do not overbeat."
Finally, I'll use the icing gun Tracey gave me and try to make 'em look all purty instead of taking the quick and easy route and smearing the frosting on with a knife.
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Speaking of cupcakes, the other day I tried a Grasshopper-flavored one from Crumbs Bake Shop,** which just opened an outpost near my office. It was big enough and sweet enough that I didn't feel like I could—or even wanted to—eat it all at one sitting. I dug it—it was chocolaty and minty after all—but it maybe had too much of an industrial-bakery taste and look that prevented me from going completely ape shit; it didn't give off even a trace of made-with-love-from-scratch vibe. I'm sure I'll go back at some point to try the Cappuccino flavor, though. I'm only human.
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It's time to leave cupcakes behind and focus on a bigger passion of mine: bar cookies. I've been thinking about going to Baked for a while now. I was aware of their presence in Brooklyn through some combination of media exposure; they get tons of publicity. And when I visited Pat in New Hope before Ken and Karen's wedding, I saw the Baked: New Frontiers in Baking cookbook in the kitchen-stuff room at Heart of the Home, one of my favorite stores in town. I almost bought the book because so many recipes in it looked fantastic, but I figured I should try Baked's wares first. Then, a couple of weeks ago at work, Joyce and I were talking about Baked, among other bakeries, because she was picking out a place to make a cake for a baby shower she was throwing. I looked at Baked's Web site and was especially chubbed up about the Brownies & Bars page. Sweet Jesus on a sheet cake!
On Friday afternoon, I took the B77 bus out to Red Hook and got off when I could tell from my trusty iPhone Map application that I was only a couple blocks away from the store. I almost always feel all dorky and uncertain on buses, mostly because I rarely take them and, on the rare occasions when I do, I'm typically going to a place I've never been before. But also because I have a tendency to be dorky and uncertain. I usually don't know where the bus is going to stop next, and I worry that it'll go past my destination and then I'll feel even dorkier.
Before placing my order, I snapped a photo of the display case of bar-cookie magnificence. I think the ones in the upper-right corner were Linzer tortish. But I had no use for them. Not when there were Lemonlime, Coffee Crisp, and Peanut Butter & Jelly Bars to be had. I got two of each, and Bob, Judy, Anna, and I devoured all but a few bites of them Friday night after pizza. They were $2.50 apiece, which I didn't think was outrageous.
On my next excursion to Baked, I'll probably try the prewrapped brownies, including, oh-so-predictably, the peppermint. Or maybe their nonbar cookies or ooh! a Tollhouse Mini Pie.
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I've been eating a lot of oven fries lately, and I'm still working out the best method for baking them so they're neither too greasy nor inclined to stick to the pan. I hit upon the idea of starting them out on parchment paper and then removing the paper when they're ready to be flipped, which I've decided should be once I start smelling them. One constant is chives: dried for now but fresh from the farmers market in the coming months. The fries need nothing else except for a liberal shaking of salt and a dash of black pepper.***
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A while back, I wrote that I wanted to try making my own version of Stonyfield Farm's Vanilla Chai Ice Cream. Well, today was the day, baby.
I don't often like to go the easy route, so I couldn't just throw some chai tea bags into a pot of half-and-half along with some vanilla beans. I figured it'd be more fun to buy the individual whole spices at D'Vine Taste, which has some big fans on Yelp. (Note to self: gotta try the chicken pot pie sometime. And note to the fourth commenter, Tam: you gotta get a grip, honey.)
I did have a box of Tazo Organic Chai tea bags on hand, which told me all of the spices that go into chai seasoning: ginger, cinnamon, black pepper, cardamom, cloves, and star anise. D'Vine Taste didn't have star anise, so I substituted anise seed instead. And even though I had some fresh ginger root in the freezer, I decided to go with the dried ginger root at the store because it might be easier to figure out guess at the correct amounts of each spice to use if they were all dried.
I ended up using 4 cinnamon sticks; 4 pieces of ginger, which I broke up into halves or thirds; 1/2 teaspoon of black peppercorns, which was the spice I was most worried about taking over; 1/2
teaspoon of anise, which is the flavor I'm least fond of; a heaping 3/4 teaspoon of cloves, which I really like; and 1 tablespoon of cardamom, which, ARROHK, I adore. (And besides, cardamom is the queen of spices. Except for when it's, er, turmeric.) I also used two vanilla beans and four English Breakfast tea bags, which the manufacturer, Classic English Tea Merchants Harrisons & Crosfield, points out on the box contained 2.5 grams of tea whereas most U.S. tea bags contain only 2 grams, at most. And since I made a double batch of ice cream, all of them were infused into 3 pints of half-and-half.
The ice cream isn't completely frozen yet, but the spoonfuls I scraped from the ice-cream-maker cannisters were very good. I think the flavors melded beautifully with no single thing coming across too strongly.
*Here's a link to a fascinating New York magazine article from 2005 about the cupcake craze that started at Magnolia in the late '90s and the incestuous web of bakeries in the city that produce the little buggers. Several former Magnolia employees have opened spinoff businesses, including one of the original partners, Jennifer Appel, who sued a former manager of her spinoff bakery, Buttercup Bake Shop, after he opened a cupcake bakery in Bay Ridge. Wikipedia says Magnolia's other original partner, Allysa Torey, sold the business in 2007, after this article was published. (Wikipedia says Appel split from Magnolia in 2000; New York says it was in '99.) Billy's, which I mentioned in the first "here"-linked post above and which is one of only two bakeries mentioned in the magazine article that I've actually eaten something from, was opened by a former manager of Magnolia.
**If there's any connection between the people behind Crumbs and anyone in the Magnolia family tree of bakeries, this New York Times article from 2003 doesn't make it known. The woman named as a co-owner then isn't mentioned on Crumbs' Web site now. The article also credits the Cupcake Cafe with leading "the cupcake resurgence" back in 1988.
***If I had more pep and at least another hour before bedtime, I'd write at length about the crazy woman in Connecticut who first got me making these fries, with chives and red pepper flakes. She had an organic farm that I agreed to apprentice on before I ended up on Guy Jones's farm instead. Because I'd left her farm once it became apparent she was waaay out there. She was convinced the Chinese controlled our weather and that the slaves had to have been happy because, otherwise, how could they have sung such beautiful spirtuals? Gah! There was more, much much more, but that'll have to wait for another day.