TWD: Perfect Party Cake Cupcakes

I'll admit that I'm a brat when it comes to kitchen failures. In general, as soon as I fail at a recipe, that recipe becomes the Fredo to my Michael Corleone - it's dead to me. I don't want it near my house. I move on and don't revisit it. That's right, I'm a quitter.


Last August, I was just a wet-behind-the-ears TWD newbie when I decided to make the Perfect Party Cake for my parents' birthdays (they conveniently have birthdays within a couple of days of each other, so cake consolidation just makes good sense). I was fresh off a rousing success with Granola Grabbers, so I was sure that I could just whip up a triple layer cake and delight my family. Well, the cake was a massive flop, not salvageable in any way. It didn't rise and it tasted terrible. I'm still not sure what went wrong - maybe my baking powder was old? That was back in the day when a thing of baking powder would last me seven years, not seven weeks. In any event, the cake went into the trash. (There was a happy ending though, because I ended up making the peach galette, and that turned out to be one of our all-time favorite desserts.)

I couldn't shake the Perfect Party Cake, though. It just looked so, well, perfect, for so many of life's white cake occasions. Fast forward five months when I was trying to figure out what cake to make for my daughter's fourth birthday. She easily settled on the theme (pink and purple princess), and I went back and forth a bit before deciding to give the PPC another try. I figured that I was a better baker in January than I was in August; I'd learned so much from my fellow TWD Bakers; and I had a new thing of baking powder. The stars were all lining up.


The cake turned out perfectly! I obviously did not do a layer cake since I was constrained by the Wilton castle cake pan, but the cake was lovely. I topped it with Dorie's buttercream, which came together without any trouble, if I recall correctly (sometimes I block out trouble though).

So when I saw that Carol of Mix Mix Stir Stir picked the Perfect Party Cake for this week's Tuesdays with Dorie, I wasn't sure if I was going to make it again, since we didn't really have an obvious occasion for a big layer cake around here. But I wimped out on the Coconut-Roasted Pineapple Dacquoise last week (lamely using the humidity as an excuse, no less) and I didn't really want to miss two weeks in a row; plus, it wasn't yet clear which one was the fluke - my PPC success or my PPC failure - and I figured a tie-breaker was the only way to find out.

I decided to cut the recipe in half and make cupcakes. There is nothing complicated about this cake. Sift together flour, baking powder and salt. Whisk milk or buttermilk (I used regular milk this time, buttermilk with the castle) and egg whites. Rub lemon zest into the sugar until the sugar is fragrant (this is one of my favorite Dorie tricks). Beat together butter and sugar, add lemon extract (I left the extract out of the cupcakes because I wanted the lemon flavor to be more subtle), then alternate adding the flour mixture and the milk mixture. I was hoping to end up with 5 or 6 cupcakes but got 10 large ones, even with a half recipe.

Cupcakes at Dusk
I decided to try something a little different and make strawberry cream cheese frosting for the cupcakes this time. I made half of this recipe, which was very good, although I ran out of powdered sugar, so it probably wasn't as sweet as it was supposed to be. But I thought it complemented the cake nicely.

I think the Perfect Party Cake lives up to its name. It is beautiful and delicious (but not too sweet) and the perfect vehicle for any frosting (or ice cream!) It is perfect even when there is no party in sight. Now that is what I call versatile. Thanks for the great pick, Carol!

TWD: Tacky Tacky Chocolate Chocolate Cupcakes

It's fall, my favorite season. I know that because the calendar tells me so. I know it because I see lots of apples, pumpkins and butternut squash showing up on my favorite food blogs. And because there is a huge haunted house inside Target. Therefore, I choose to ignore the 80 degree weather outside, and do what I've done every fall since I moved to the South, and dress myself and my children for what I wish the weather to be, not for what the weather actually is, and sweat my way through another beautiful Alabama October.

My kids are in the fall spirit, too. The other night, they told me that they wanted to decorate for Halloween. And before I could stop myself, I had a pleasant little daydream about fall decorating. I visualized rooms like this:



With maybe a pretty pumpkin/gourd display like this on the front porch:



I imagined hues of red, gold and orange; natural elements that evoke the essence of autumn; fallen leaves, pumpkins, mums. But it turns out that this vision of fall decorating was not even close to the one that my children had in mind, so instead, we went with the iridescent "HAPPY HALLOWEEN" banner:



When I see homes or garden displays similar to the ones above on HGTV, or in magazines, they will usually describe it as something like "understated elegance." Well, my children vastly prefer a decorating style that would be better described as "overstated excessiveness," which, if I recall correctly, was very popular in the 70s.

So on the mantel, we have this:




Yes, that's a plastic black cat flashlight, and an eyeball that rolls around randomly and blares the theme to "The Adams Family" at a decibel level previously only heard at Metallica concerts.

Friendly ghost and monster hanging out on the rocking chair along with needlepoint pillow of the Rotunda at UVA (Go Hoos!):



And the trash bag ghost hanging in the corner of the den! My son made that in kindergarten last year:



Here on an end table, we have glow-in-the-dark skeletons resting against my son's picture, half of a Little People Halloween play set (the people are missing), and a monster that dances and sings "Superfreak."




I say that when you have a theme going, you just need to run with it. Maybe someday I can do "tasteful," but for now, "tacky" carries the day, and that's just fine by me. Tacky is much more fun. So I decided that we would fully embrace my children's "more is more" philosophy when making these Chocolate Chocolate Cupcakes, which were chosen by the always fun and talented Clara of iheartfoodforthought. I am sure that many mega-talented TWD bakers made a stunningly elegant presentation of these cupcakes, and I cannot wait to check them all out. Us? We thought it would be best if the cupcakes matched the rest of the house, so I gave the kids full creative license in decorating these. And they took their jobs very seriously:



Because only by maintaining their steely focus could they ensure that no square millimeter of cupcake was left candy cornless.




Making the cupcakes was uneventful, which is an event in itself around here. The batter was highly lickable, and created some lofty expectations for the cupcakes. In fact, a bowl of this batter, a spoon, a comfy chair and a copy of People magazine might just be my personal definition of heaven.



The cupcakes looked like cupcakes when they came out of the oven:



Amanda made these a few weeks early and told me that next time she'd take them out of the oven a few minutes earlier, as she thought they were a tad on the dry side. I followed her advice and took them out after 20 minutes. They were definitely done by then, and I agreed with Amanda that they were a little dry. Dorie writes that these have a "close crumb," which may be world-renowned bakerspeak for "they're a little dry." Keep in mind that I don't have a particularly sophisticated palate, though, as evidenced by the fact that up until just last week, if the occasion called for chocolate cupcakes, I would have called on my good friend Betty Crocker Super Moist (which is, well, SUPERMOIST!!) But the flavor was great, and anyway, who would even notice the relative dryness/moistness of my cupcakes under all those Jack 'o Lantern Peeps?

The frosting, er, ganache, was wonderful. I used milk chocolate instead of bittersweet because I was trying to appeal to a youthful crowd. We had a lot of fun with these!! Clara, thanks for picking a fun recipe that helped us get into the Halloween spirit in the way that only an inverted candy corn nose can!