I’d like everyone to know how dedicated I am to this blog. HOW dedicated, you ask? Dedicated enough to turn my oven on to 400 degrees, when my kitchen is already 90 degrees, just to make muffins to show to you. That, my friends, is dedication. See? And this is before I turned the oven on!
But, I have to admit, it was kind of worth it. These muffins are pretty tasty; they are surprisingly light and have a good texture to them – not too cakey or dense. Plus I loaded them up with enough blueberries to choke a horse. Assuming horses eat blueberries? I mean, I suppose they do, or would, if someone gave them some. In which case, they’d choke on these muffins.
I’ve been looking for something else to make with blueberries besides ghetto-cobbler [for real, last time I made cobbler, I didn't have flour, so I doctored some pancake mix and used that!] and realized that duh – muffins. Especially since I’ve had two over-priced muffins from the eateries in my office building as of late [I'm looking at you, Au Bon Pain]. So I searched the trusty allrecipes.com for a recipe that looked like what I wanted. Of course, me being me, I ended up with something entirely different.
The recipe I ended up making used sour cream, which intrigued me since I’ve liked using cream cheese and buttermilk in baked goods previously. So, off to the kitchen I went, with the recipe in hand. I did make a few alterations to the recipe, and still think there could be something else added for extra flavor – cardamom, maybe? – but regardless, they were worth the effort and gone very quickly.
Blueberry Cream Muffins
(my changes in bold)
2 eggs
1/2 cup white sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 cup sour cream
2 cups blueberries
Zest and juice of one lemon
Preheat oven to 400. Zest and juice the lemon. Add to the blueberries. Beat eggs, gradually add both types of sugar. Then add the vanilla and oil. Once that’s all mixed, add in the sour cream. Then add the dry ingredients. Last, gently fold in the blueberries.
Yes, I know that the instructions I wrote are much simpler than the ones in the original recipe. I’m okay with that; while I’m sure there are a number of reasons for all the complicated mixing, I like my way just fine. Plus, 90 degrees in my kitchen.
Look at those! Bursting with blueberries. I probably did go a bit overboard, and next time would use 1.5 cups, but still. Blueberries baked into anything make me happy, and these muffins had plenty of that.
I can't think of anything funny to say about blueberries.
Cake is actually the best part of a cupcake.
With all due respect to my dear co-blogger, frosting is most certainly not the best part of a cupcake. They don’t call it a frostingcake, do they? Or a cupfrosting? No! Cup. Cake. Clearly, cake wins.
And let me tell you, this cake wins everything. It’s all those cliche things people always say about cake: it’s moist! It’s rich! It’s delicious! It has a delicate crumb! [What does that even mean? I always hear it being used in conjunction with cakes. Maybe I'm too much of a plebeian to get it?]
But I digress. This cake is really good. The recipe is courtesy of the same lady that gave me the pound cake recipe. I’m pretty sure she’s a baking genius.
I have to admit, I didn’t follow the recipe exactly, but it was pretty damn close:
2 & ½ Cups of sifted flour
1 & ½ Cups of sugar
½ teaspoon of salt
1 teaspoon of baking soda
1 teaspoon of coco
1 cup of buttermilk
1 & 1/2cups of Oil or (Soft Butter)
1 teaspoon of vinegar
2 eggs
1 ounce of Red food coloring
1 teaspoon of vanilla flavor
Preheat oven to 350. Cream together sugar and oil or (butter). Add eggs, beat well. Sift together flour, salt, and soda (set aside). Mix together food coloring, vinegar, and coco. Add to sugar and oil mixture. Add vanilla. Add flour mixture alternately with the buttermilk. Blend well. Pour batter into two, well greased and floured pans, or spray with non-stick oil. Bake for 35 minutes. Cool.
I, of course, had to make cupcakes instead of cake. I always feel pressured when I make cake; that it has to rise perfectly, and there always seems to be so much of it. Cupcakes are way less pressure. Plus, they’re easier to carry to work, which is why I made them in the first place — it was my turn to bake for the department birthdays.
The only other change I made was to scale back a bit on the fat in the recipe. I used butter, but I only used two sticks [only! my husband was horrified and intrigued at having to take out two sticks of butter for me before I got home from work]. I also used slightly less sugar than listed, but didn’t cut back too much, since I wasn’t sure how that’d affect the taste. I feel like I could cut it by maybe a third of a cup and not have the taste affected too much.
See? I even spelled out “happy birthday” in little candy pieces. How precious am I? I also made one for the husband, because he looked all sad face at the thought of me bringing all the cupcakes to work. Yes, that is store bought frosting. Cream cheese frosting, which I’ve heard some people like on this cake and other people think is blasphemy. It works for me though, because I feel like it cuts some of the sweetness of the cake.
But seriously people, do yourself a favor and make this cake, in whatever form you want. Look at how beautiful it is!
Frosting is the best part of a cupcake
For realz. No lies. Cake is good. Frosting makes it great.
I love sprinkles, and frosting, and cakes! The ones in the upper-right are Erin's. 
I had a pretty cupcake-heavy couple of weeks a little while ago and I’ve been meaning to post a bit about them here, so it’s about time to finally catch up! And really, who doesn’t love cupcakes? People without souls, that’s who.
Rambling Regarding Rhubarb
And cake. But who doesn’t like some late-night alliteration?
I got both strawberries and rhubarb in my farm share last week, so the logical thing to do with them seemed to be dessert. I’ve eaten strawberry rhubarb pie before, but had never seen raw rhubarb in person until this week. It’s so colorful!
As it turns out, I’m way too lazy to make a pie crust from scratch nine times out of ten (or more). And I’d already eaten strawberry rhubarb pie anyways. Time for something new: cake! Cake that doesn’t tempt me to use the octopus pan. Cake that works like a clafoutis or an apple charlotte; cake where you just pour batter over fruit and hope for the best… easy, tasty cake.
Success Cake
So last time I posted, I wrote about failure cake. Specifically, I talked about my failure to remove cakes from shaped pans. This time: Victory.
Last Saturday I was able to successfully unmold forty small flower shaped cakes!
Rose-shaped victory cake
The plan for Cake Experiment was to change one variable at a time. For example, last time I tried using this ridiculous pan, I greased it with melted butter and used a honey cake mix. So this time, I should have tried changing the grease or the mix, but not both. In the interest of actually getting to eat the cake, experimental integrity be damned. I changed both. The largest contributing factor was most likley the grease. This time I used Baker’s Joy. It’s this neat-o spray that does the greasing and the flouring at once.
This is the baking spray of victory. Also shown: victory cake mix and victory pan.
Baker’s Joy (or some similar spray) gets into all the detailed bits of the pan with the oil AND the flour, so nothing sticks!
The cake mix may have helped a little, too. The only other time this pan worked even a little bit, I used the same mix (Duncan Gernam Chocolate, in case you were wondering). Cake Experiment: Phase Two will involve cake from scratch, plus Baker’s Joy. I’ll report back my findings.
Shaped pan filled with delicious batter, pre-victory. See how it glistens with Baker's Joy goodness?
I said sometimes we cook healthy things.
At work, I supervise a team of people, and help to oversee the department. One of the women on my team had requested I make a specific cake for her birthday, since we make baked goods once a month for all the birthdays in the department. The recipe came from her grandmother whom, beyond leading an apparently full life, doesn’t believe in using less than two sticks of butter in any of the recipes I’ve seen her from her. However, she certainly knows what she’s talking about, as this cake is good.
This is much more dense and rich version of a pound cake. It has cream cheese in it, which I was skeptical about at first, but I have to admit that now I probably won’t make a regular pound cake again.
I pretty much followed this recipe to the letter, although I did omit the baking powder, as I prefer to use cake flour when baking.
This is the recipe, copied directly from her email:
2 sticks of soft butter
8oz cream cheese (get regular not that whipped or lite cream cheese) [I love this! The other recipe I have from her also has a similar parenthetical scolding about using anything less than real butter.]
3 cups of sugar
6 eggs
3 1/2 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon of salt
1 level teaspoon of baking powder
2 – 3 teaspoons of whatever flavoring you prefer. [I split my batter into three batches, and used roughly about a teaspoon of vanilla, lemon and almond extract for the divided batter.]
Preheat oven to 350, and grease your baking pan (or use the Pam spray with flour, which I love). I chose to make cupcakes the second time I made this recipe, mostly because I find it easier to transport cupcakes to work than cake.
Cream the butter, cream cheese and sugar together. Thank your co-workers for getting you a KitchenAid mixer for a wedding gift.Â
Add the eggs one at a time, and once those are fully incorporated, add in the flour one cup at a time. If you’re like me, you won’t heed those wise words and will dump all the flour in at once, which of course leads to you and your mixer covered in flour. And maybe the floor. And maybe some got on the cat, but he doesn’t care, so I guess that doesn’t really matter? But I digress! (I usually do.) Once you add all the ingredients, you should have a thick and delicious batter that looks like this:
At this point, you’re ready to bake it. If you’re using a pan, I can’t stress enough that you have to grease the pan very well. However, if you go the easy route like me, just put a (hopefully) equal amount of batter in each cupcake liner.
Now, the original recipe calls for about an hour of baking time (the first 30 minutes at 350, then lower the heat down to 340) , but that’s only if you’re making cake. Since I was making cupcakes, that cut the time down considerably, and they were done in about 20 minutes, but my oven may be the devil, so you will have to keep an eye on them the first time around. Also, because I’m lazy like that, I didn’t lower the heat when I was making my cupcakes. I’m sure there’s a reason to do it, though, so I suggest you try when making the cake. Let me know how it works out!
The finished product should have a light golden color, and be firm to the touch. I found that the cupcakes fell slightly after they cooled, although when I made this in cake pans, they didn’t. Weird? I don’t know. Delicious? Yes.
Failure cake
So this is my first blog post (finally)! I just wanted to get something out here, so I’m going to gripe about failure cake.
Failure cake!
I have a problem. I love semi-useless and strangely shaped baking pans. Every time I buy one, the first few cakes I bake in them work out perfectly, and then never again. I committed to baking a Kosher for passover octopus shaped cake for a coworker recently, and stayed up past midnight three nights in a row trying to get it to work. No dice. I got the tentacles out of the pan, but not all at once, and the head of the octopus was a total loss. I’ll get this to work eventually because octopuses are just that cool. They deserve a cake tribute.
I wanted to be able to deliver something for Passover, so I switched to tiny flower-shaped cakes that I *knew* would work with box cake (a fool proof plan?). No. The cakes just won’t come out of the mold! But man, they are so delicious. I left them to my roommate who gladly consumed them.
Sad face.
So to leave on a happy note, here is a genius idea Katie and Michelle devised at poker. Cookie sandwich made with snickerdoodle cookies and filled with snickerdoodle cookie dough. Cookie squared == so good!
Snickerdoodle squared
