It's the Yeast I Can Do

P’s graduation brunch cupcakes, 05.18.13

P graduated from law school this weekend! Naturally, there’s no celebration like a two-day food fest, so… I made my old standby chocolate cupcakes with coffee buttercream, and then, to make something the doctor of jurisprudence could actually enjoy, found a healthier carrot cake recipe. Well, we found like half a dozen, but this one passed muster. Check it out:

Carrot Cake (adapted from Eating Well)

1 20-oz. can crushed pineapple 
2 c whole-wheat flour
2 t baking soda 
1/2 t salt 
2 t ground cinnamon 
3 eggs 
1 1/2 c granulated sugar 
3/4 c low-fat buttermilk 
1/4 c canola oil 
1/4 c unsweetened applesauce
1 t vanilla extract
2 c grated carrots (4-6 medium)
1/4 c unsweetened flaked coconut
1/2 c chopped walnuts, toasted

12 oz reduced-fat cream cheese, softened 
1/2 c powdered sugar 
1/2 T vanilla extract 
flaked coconut, toasted

Preheat oven to 350°F. Line muffin tin with cupcake liners. 

Drain pineapple in a sieve set over a bowl, pressing on the solids. Reserve the drained pineapple and 1/4 cup of the juice.

Whisk flour, baking soda, salt, and cinnamon in a medium bowl. Whisk eggs, sugar, buttermilk, oil, vanilla and the reserved pineapple juice in a large bowl until blended. Stir in pineapple, carrots, and 1/4 cup coconut. Mix in the dry ingredients until blended. Stir in the nuts. Scrape the batter into the tin.

Bake until the top springs back when touched lightly and a skewer inserted in the center comes out clean, about 20 minutes. Let cool completely on a wire rack.

Beat cream cheese, powdered sugar, and vanilla with an electric mixer until smooth and creamy. Spread the frosting over the cooled cake. Sprinkle with toasted coconut.

Makes 24 cupcakes

Momofuku birthday cake, 11.17.12

Grownup funfetti. Not as complicated as it looked in the recipe, but my mom will tell you it was like torture waiting for it to thaw this morning.

From Momofuku Milk Bar

Carrie & Rob’s wedding, 10.06.12

My co-worker Carrie asked me ages ago if I’d bake for her wedding. As a Chronicle employee, she’d had plenty of chances to try my wares, and she figured if she was going to be spending a bunch of money on baked goods for a wedding, they might as well be ones she knew she liked, by someone she knows. She and her fiancé asked for a simple vanilla, plus a chocolate/coffee variety, and I was more than happy to deliver. Two freezers and seven pounds of butter later… Here’s what 200 cupcakes looks like!

Recipes here, here, and here

Triple chocolate bacon cake, 08.06.12

“You don’t have to get me anything,” he says. “Just make me a dessert you think I’d like,” he says. This, from the guy whose three favorite sentences inside the kitchen or out are: 1) “We could make a bread pudding out of this,” 2) “Ooh, but with a nice ganache…,” and 3) “You could deep-fry that.”

I found an old piece on Girlichef that looked like it might suit alright — chocolate and bacon, after all, are a pretty winning combination these days — but as I read through the post, I realized the lady wasn’t happy with the cake, the buttercream, or the bacon; for those keeping score, that’s all three constituent parts. So I took some liberties…

I used my favorite Smitten Kitchen chocolate cake recipe (one bowl and three sticks of butter? sold) for the base, swapping her cinnamon for espresso powder. Then I piled on my go-to buttercream, adapted from Baked Bree to include my secret ingredient and a little extra stiffener, due in part to distraction and in part to ameliorate the over-softened butter. I topped it with the ganache from Baked Explorations’ chocolate coffee cake, aka my birthday cake to self last year. And then, you know, because that’s not rich enough, candied bacon. It’s as close to writing a recipe as I’ve come, and someday when it’s not two days late and two hours past my bedtime, maybe I’ll get around to adding it to this post. Stay tuned.

P.S. Two pounds of butter, one pound of bacon, 8 ounces of Valrhona.

P.P.S. Bonus points if you get the Breaking Bad reference without clicking through.

P.P.P.S. It’s gone.

Flag cake, 07.04.12

Happy Fourth of July! I pieced together this plan from a couple different places, and as you can see by the first few photos, things didn’t really go smoothly at first. Fortunately, I had enough supplies to make two, so I started over, and I think it turned out pretty well.

Theory from Betty Crocker, buttercream cake via Smitten Kitchen, buttercream based (as always) on Baked Bree’s