It's the Yeast I Can Do
When a Knead-To-Know Basis just isn't enough
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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!
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Cupcake variety, 07.30.12
I did a couple different recipes for a friend of mine from work to try out. Looks like I’m doing a wedding, y’all!
Adapted from Smitten Kitchen (1, 2, 3 & 4) and Baked Bree
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Meatloaf cupcakes, 04.15.12
Top: Clockwise from top: Meatloaf cupcakes with peppered mashed potato frosting and bacon and chive sprinkles; Sister Schubert’s rolls, because you’re crazy if you think I’m making bread on top of the rest of this; steamed green beans; and fried potato skins, because the first thing I thought when faced with the peels was “I could fry those….”
Below: Better detail shot of the cupcake, taken this morning with real light.
Inspired by First Look Then Cook, but honestly more adapted from Sticky Gooey Creamy Chewy; potatoes and chili sauce layer almost entirely my own (which is to say the latter doesn’t include its namesake ingredient at all, for example)
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Chocolate cupcones and smash cake, 10.21.11
Somehow I got it in my head that this recipe needed to be tripled, so there was, um, a bit of an excess of chocolate batter. Ergo, bonus smash cake! Also, I’m totally onto your tricks, cake decorating places. You just do those pretty rings around the bottom of cakes to hide your smudges, don’t you? Yeah. Nice.
Cake recipe from All Recipes
Frosting recipe adapted from Baked Bree
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Vanilla cake and cupcones, 10.21.11
The biggest task I faced this week was the 100 ice cream cone cupcakes — half chocolate, half vanilla. Fortunately, I got to use a commissary kitchen Friday night after work (a kitchen that by itself is larger than my entire Treehouse, mind you) to cut my prep and baking time to a more-reasonable-than-it-otherwise-would-have-been 4-5 hours. The spare batter went to a couple of 4” springforms to make a double-layer smash cake for the kiddo.
Cake recipe from The Kitchen Counter Cooking School, which I conveniently reviewed for work just last week
Frosting recipe adapted from Baked Bree
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Trial-run ice cream cone cupcakes, 10.08.11
You’re going to see these again in a few weeks, but I needed to test out the recipes and a few techniques to see what worked and what didn’t before I go diving into eight dozen of these. Verdicts? Foil around the base doesn’t do shit, and they stand up fine in the muffin tins. No marshmallow necessary, as the batter didn’t soak through at all. For some odd reason, this recipe never browns. And after almost two whole batches of botched frosting: There’s such a thing as *too* room temperature.
Adapted from The Kitchen Counter Cooking School and Baked Bree
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Frosting practice, 10.08.11
Piping just isn’t my thing, y’all. But if this isn’t the most beautiful thing to come out of an open star tip in my kitchen, I don’t know what is. I told my mom that after 100, they’d be damn near perfect; then she reminded me of the existence of hand cramps, and we revised our theory to be a bit more of a bell curve.
Adapted from Baked Bree
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Chocolate coffee cupcakes, 07.16.11
Happy birthday, James and J. Scott! Happy leftovers, Green House! I have a new favorite chocolate cupcake recipe, provided I remember to read the little note I just scrawled to myself in the cookbook’s margins about this being an incredible sticky batter, and one not to be trifled with w/r/t spillage and overfilling.
From the Barefoot Contessa -
Strawberry cupcakes, round 2 (Cake Mix Doctor edition), 07.10.11
Anne Byrn, aka the Cake Mix Doctor, publishes a series of cookbooks that start with a base of cake mix and add other ingredients — fresh fruit, pudding, extracts, etc. — to dress up what would be otherwise very straightforward cake from a box. Since all her products hinge heavily on one product (that is, cake mix), she decided to start making her own: Cake Doctor’s Mix. Virginia got samples of a few boxes and sent me with one to play with. Since I was making strawberry cupcakes anyway this week, I snagged a golden yellow box and a recipe card with her strawberry suggestion. In my opinion, the strawberry gelatin aftertaste shines through a little too much, but the fresh strawberries in the frosting, while making it a little harder to spread evenly, add something refreshing to that layer. Let’s see what the taste testers think!
From the Cake Mix Doctor -
![Strawberry cupcakes, 07.07.11For Matt, my matchless concert date of five years, who’s leaving Austin all too soon. Because nothing says “Goddamnit, we’re going to miss you” like cupcakes at the Treehouse and [root] beers at the Draught House with two poets.From Smitten Kitchen](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lo01kjyYBT1qm383to1_500.jpg)
Strawberry cupcakes, 07.07.11
For Matt, my matchless concert date of five years, who’s leaving Austin all too soon. Because nothing says “Goddamnit, we’re going to miss you” like cupcakes at the Treehouse and [root] beers at the Draught House with two poets.
From Smitten Kitchen
