Tres leches, move over. There’s a new cake in town with three iterations of the same component: tres (or maybe it should be trois?) ganaches chocolate raspberry cupcakes. Sounds decadent, right? Well, they were. Decadent, extravagant, and definitely delicious…if possibly slightly unnecessarily complicated.

Not only that, but I used expensive eating chocolate for all of them. Bars and bars of the $3-$5 for two frickin’ ounces kind of eating chocolate. Valrhona raspberry ganache fills both the raspberry inside the cupcake and the one on top. Around the interior raspberry is a Scharffen Berger ganache. Finally, Michel Cluizel ganache frosting swirled on top crowns it all. The only reason I said that it was possibly unnecessary was that while eating the cupcake it wasn’t necessarily apparent that there were three different chocolates in play. But you definitely could tell that the chocolate involved was really, really good chocolate.

Now, before you think that this is a completely inappropriate post for the current economic climate, let me explain: I’ve been using up ingredients in my pantry, one of the thriftiest ways to save money in the kitchen. Let me introduce you to my secret source of unending shame: my chocolate collection.

Now, I know I’m not the only one who has chocolate hidden in her kitchen cupboards–in my younger and sneakier days, I used to liberate sweets from a hiding spot or two that I knew about. But I’m not ashamed of my collection for the usual reasons. No, I’m ashamed because I’ve had bars and bars and bars of high-quality chocolate in my possession for ages and never got around to eating it. I’ve meant to rectify the situation for a long time now, but somehow the enormity of this crime against chocolate and checkbook makes it even harder to do anything about it. I was saving these bars for a purpose, so it seemed like eating them for the sake of eating them rather than for some grander reason was doing them yet another disservice.

It all started in pastry school. In one of the few actual take-home assignments they ever gave us, we were assigned to write a paper on a single ingredient used in the pastry kitchen. At that point, I’d taken a three day workshop on chocolate work and gotten a glimpse of the world of high-quality chocolate, so I picked that as my subject to investigate. My research led me to a fantastic book, The New Taste of Chocolate: A Cultural and Natural History of Cacao with Recipes, that not only told the history of chocolate and explained how it was processed in greater depth than I’d encountered before, but went into detail about the three different types of trees–criollo, forastero and trinitario–and the different chocolate-producing regions of the world and how those differences affected the chocolate’s flavor and quality.

The book also shows you how to properly taste chocolate, and while that’s a fairly common foodie thing to do now, back then the specialty chocolate craze was just getting started. Our favorite grocery store–the Shoreline Central Market–was stocking a lot of single-origin bars at the time, so we’d pick a couple up every time we went shopping. That’s when I fell in love with Michel Cluizel’s chocolate. The package for one of his single plantation chocolates claimed that you could taste the flavor of green olives, and when that flavor spread over my tastebuds as the chocolate melted on my tongue, I was hooked.

I started buying one of every chocolate bar that I saw, justifying it as part of my education as a future pastry chef. We had a few friends–and most of Chris’ extended family, once–join us in tastings where I’d share both my collection of chocolate and my collection of chocolate knowledge with them (if only I’d started teaching chocolate classes professionally back then…I would have been ahead of all of the ones that have popped up since!), but for the most part, I would taste one or two squares of the bar and save it. Why? Because at some point I wanted to sit down and do a real chocolate tasting. I wanted to taste them all side-by-side (this was before wine tasting taught me that your palate gets exhausted if you try to taste the subtleties of too many products in the same day), I wanted to take notes, I wanted to do it right. And any time I want to do something right…well, the odds of me actually doing it go down considerably. It’s the curse of the perfectionist: why bother doing something if you aren’t going to do it better than anyone else ever has?

So, I kept buying chocolate, and I kept collecting bars, many of them not even opened to taste my usual two squares because I was saving them for my tasting to end all tastings. In a way, it did end all tastings, because I stopped indulging in my informal little chocolate explorations, in my informal chocolate classes with my friends. And my chocolate languished, waiting to be liberated.

So, what does this have to do with cupcakes?

The answer is simple: I am liberating my chocolate.

Yes, it’s on the old side. Believe me, I got a good, hard time about that from some of the cupcakes recipients this weekend. It’s served most of a life sentence and had given up hope of parole.

But, fortunately, chocolate doesn’t exactly go bad, not in the spoiling sense of the word. Mine doesn’t look so hot, but it still tastes like expensive chocolate. A good chocolate bar stored in a cool, dark environment won’t start to lose its quality and flavor for at least a year. Over a more extended period, that bar will eventually fall out of temper, especially if it’s storage location is less than ideal. The flavor will probably lose some of its potency and complexity, like dried herbs left in the cupboard for too long. A speckled white coating might form on the chocolate, which may look like mold to the uninitiated but is really just “bloom”, formed by the cocoa butter separating out and rising to the surface. Or the chocolate may just turn dull, losing the shine that it had (hopefully) when it was in temper. If you try to break it, it won’t have the well-tempered snap that you look for, either.

To a certain point, you can put it back in temper if you know how. I know how to temper chocolate, but with chocolate as old as mine…well, there really is only one thing to do: bake with it. I did this first with the Rainbow Cookies I made last Christmas, where the wonderful flavor of Michel Cluizel’s chocolate elevated the colorful little bars to something truly on another level of deliciousness, and since then I’ve decided to dispose of the rest of the chocolate in the same way. These cupcakes made a huge dent in the collection.

I’ve been with the same writing critique group for almost four years now. One of the members has a birthday coming up, and we planned to surprise her with a celebration at our most recent meeting. I volunteered to make the cake, and I wanted to do something really special for my friend. I saw some beautiful fresh raspberries while I was out shopping, and the idea for these cupcakes was born. I was hoping they’d turn out to be as glamorous as I envisioned them, and I think, for once, they did.

So, that’s the story behind the trois ganaches. These cupcakes could easily be made with any decent dark chocolate, and in the future I’d only make two different ganaches–a raspberry one for the inside, and a plain one for the top. I’d go entirely with raspberry ganache except that it doesn’t have quite as smooth of an appearance as regular ganache, so it’s more suitable for filling cupcakes.

After all that chocolate talk, let’s start by looking at the most important part of a truly good cupcake, the cake itself. In my opinion, it’s easy to make cupcakes look pretty or cute, and a lot harder to master baking them.

If you’ve been reading my blog for awhile, you may remember that I’ve had some difficulties with baking cupcakes in the past. Since then, I’ve learned my lesson and stuck to recipes intended specifically for cupcakes from books that are all about cupcakes. To that end, I picked up a copy of Martha Stewart’s Cupcakes and this was my first attempt at one of the recipes.

I tend to trust Martha Stewart recipes, and Martha definitely didn’t fail me this time. I used the Devil’s Food Cupcakes recipe for these, and they were perfect for the purpose: not so chocolatey that they’d just seem like an extension of all the ganache I was planning to utilize, but not watered down like so many chocolate baked goods are. The texture was so soft and moist–in the recipe’s description, they attribute this to sour cream–and they were divine both warm from the oven and cooled down and decorated. (For reference, the recipe yielded 18 normal-sized cupcakes and 24 mini cupcakes. The baking time was spot on for my oven, with a five minute deduction to the time when baking the mini cupcakes.)

I baked them Friday night and then set about decorating them Saturday morning. First thing, I washed the raspberries and laid them out to dry on a cooling rack covered in paper towels, making sure that there was no water inside or out because the raspberries were going to be surrounded by ganache and water is a great way to invite mold into your chocolates. I made my raspberry ganache, so it would have a little time to set up to a pipeable consistency before I started filling the cupcakes. I improvised the recipe, and the formula is easy to remember: 8 oz. of dark chocolate (Valrhona in this case), 8 oz. of cream, and 8 oz. of raspberry preserves. I put the preserves straight into the cream as I heated it to simmering, mixing to combine the two, and strained it over the chocolate to keep the seeds out of the ganache.

You can make the ganache the traditional way and pour the hot cream over finely chopped chocolate, wait five minutes and then whisk it until smooth, or–if you feel confident in your ability too melt chocolate in the microwave without scorching it–you can use the cheater’s method I figured out to save my injured shoulder: melt the chocolate in the microwave, let the cream cool down a little bit from simmering before you add it, and whisk them both together right away. That allows you to leave the chocolate in bigger chunks rather than do all of that fine chopping. You just have to be careful with chocolate in the microwave: zap it for a minute, then stir, then stir after every additional thirty seconds. You want to stop while there are still a few unmelted chunks. Residual heat will melt those the rest of the way.

I set that to the side and stirred it from time to time as I prepared the cupcakes to be filled. I certainly didn’t invent this method, but I figured I might as well take photos of how I did it as I went:

First, I picked out the size of round cutter I wanted to use and measured it against the height of the cupcakes. The cupcake was taller, so that meant that I could push the cutter all the way down without worrying about punching through the bottom of the cupcake.

Next, I centered the cookie cutter on top…

…pushed it down into the cupcake evenly…

…and then pulled it out, giving the cutter a slight twist as I did so. The center of the cupcake came out whole most of the time, but when a large crumb or two did stick in the bottom of the hole I’d created, I’d flick them out with the tip of the paring knife.

Then, I carefully cut away the very top of the cupcake’s center, saving it as a little lid for the filling. The rest when into a bowl of cake crumbs, which never got very full because the cake really was too good to not eat.

Once I had the centers cut out, the raspberry ganache seemed to be thick enough to pipe, so I made up a simple ganache with 8 oz. of the Scharffen Berger chocolate I had (a combination of semisweet, dark and extra dark) and about 1 1/4 cups of cream. I poured that into a pie plate so it would cool faster as I worked with it, but it was pretty much fine for filling the cupcakes by the time I was set up and ready to go. I wanted it to be pretty fluid so that the raspberries could settle in properly.

It went something like this:

One cupcake, with its lid.

Add a small scoop full of the plain ganache.

Fill a raspberry with the Valrhona raspberry ganache, making sure not to leave any air pockets inside. (Like the water I mentioned above, air also encourages mold to grow inside of chocolates.)

Set the raspberry open-end down in the center of the other ganache.

Top the raspberry with another scoop of the plain ganache, making sure to fill the hole all the way to the top.

Press the cupcake’s lid down onto the ganache to seal it up and hide the treat waiting inside.

At that point, I put them straight into the fridge because I didn’t want to leave that raspberry surrounded by lukewarm ganache for very long. That gave me time to make the ganache frosting out of the Martha Stewart book with the Michel Cluizel chocolate and cool it in a pair of pie plates in the fridge–a trick I remember from pastry school when we were bringing ganaches and other fillings for molded chocolates down to room temperature. In retrospect, I wasn’t as fond of the ganache recipe as I was of the cupcake recipe–it dulled too easily, and set up too quickly as I was working with it, even in the summer heat, which means it might have benefited from more cream or corn syrup–but I made it work. All there was left to do was decorate the cupcakes, which is the fun part.

Like I said before, I wanted them to look glamorous, so I sprinkled them with some shiny “chocolate flakes” I picked up at Central Market a few weeks ago in the bulk section and painted the raspberries with a mixture of a few drops of Grand Marnier and a quarter teaspoon of a berry-colored luster dust I’d bought for another cupcake project and then never used.

What I was really excited about, though, was opening the raspberries up and using them flat against the top of the cupcake. I’m sure I’m not the first to do this, but I’ve never seen it before. The idea came to me when I was checking out the raspberries I bought and noticing how strong and firm they were, how they even stayed together if I opened them up along one side. I’m always looking for any fondant alternative I can find that has a better taste and texture, and fresh fruit definitely fits the bill. I think it not only looked cool but heightened the raspberry-to-chocolate ratio, which is always a good thing.

I thought they looked a little like dragon scales with the luster dust…

…but my critique group thought they looked like brains. I’ll forgive them. We’re all writing novels somewhere along the scifi/fantasy continuum, so we have conversations about various supernatural creatures currently popular in the urban fantasy market on a regular basis, zombies included.

Here’s a bunch of them all together. I have to recommend the 3 Tier Snapware Snap N Stack Cupcake, Cookie and Cake Carrier. We picked one of these up at Costco a month or two ago. I’m not sure if they still have them, but after using mine for the first time this weekend, I’m going to buy another one if they do, just in case I need to transport a lot of cupcakes to an event. What I like about this one is that it’s extremely versatile: each of the tiers has a reversible tray insert–one side is flat, and the other has rings to hold cupcakes in place. The trays have handles that also allow you to suspend them halfway up the tier, either for carrying two layers of cookies or other flat baked goods (giving you a total of six layers with all three tiers) or for serving the cupcakes in the tier so that people don’t have to reach all the way inside and risk bumping the frosting. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to scramble for shallow, flat containers to carry baked goods to parties and holiday dinners.

Finally, here’s one of the mini cupcakes I mentioned. They were too small to stuff with raspberries, and I used up the Scharffen Berger ganache on the bigger cupcakes, so I filled them entirely with the raspberry ganache. This made them a little different from the big cupcakes, sort of like a tasty little truffle surrounded by cake. I love how small they looked in comparison to the big raspberries.

I’ve written about these cupcakes before, but in few enough words to hide the real story, the one I wanted to tell the moment I snapped this photo. But now that we’ve passed a magic number I’ve untied my own hands, so I want to share: the moment I looked down through the camera lens and saw that tiny, little red heart, I knew I was going to be someone’s mom, and that someone wanted to say “Hi.”

I’ve long thought that studying literature in college makes you more likely to see symbolism and structure in your own life. I’ve never decided whether those material metaphors woven into the ups and downs of daily existence truly mean something. It’s tempting to think so, especially when you have questions that no one can answer for you but time. Still, in a rational world, it’s natural to be suspicious of any signs you think you see in the world around you. Particularly when the sign in question has a bit too much in common with those images of the Virgin Mary that “miraculously appear” on a piece of toast. Back when I was working a dessert buffet as a pastry cook, all it took to burn the image of Trogdor (a cartoon dragon, for those not in the know) into the top of a giant creme brulee was a deft hand with a blow torch.

But this heart convinced me better than the actual pregnancy tests I took days later did. Those were easy to doubt, to question, but the moment I saw the heart, I knew. Sure, it helped that I’d been getting lightheaded all morning while I was up and around baking, and that what was to become a four-day straight headache had just set in. That didn’t stop me from knowing that this was a message just for me, the girl born on Valentine’s Day.

Hopefully, between the cupcake and the heart, this is a sign that we’re going to be welcoming a very sweet, very loving child into our lives. If nothing else, a lot of people have come by the site to see what I consider our first “baby photo”, even if they didn’t know what they were looking at.

So for my long absence–and my severe aversion to even the thought of those vegetarian Peeps I made–I have our future foodie-in-training to thank. He or she will be showing up around the first week of December, so I probably won’t be posting another flood of cookies and chocolates around Christmas again this year. But now that I’ve hit the second trimester and I’m feeling more like cooking, I hope to catch up on answering comments and be around more regularly.

And I mean that this time. As long as no one mentions those Peeps. I’m still having issues with them.

Tonight, Battlestar Galactica’s final episode airs. While the quality hasn’t always been consistent, the miniseries pilot and the first season of the show (running into the first few episodes of the second season) had an excellent plot arc and some of the finest writing, acting and production I’ve ever seen on the small screen. Even my least favorite episodes have had their own flashes of brilliance. I’m very sad to see it go, but I can understand wanting to end the show intentionally instead of risking being canceled or just having the creative juices fizzle out.

I suggested to a couple of our friends that we should get together for a viewing party. That got me thinking that I’d like to make something special to commemorate the occasion. The inspiration that came to me was the mandala that Starbuck paints over and over again throughout both her life and the seasons of the show. She’s my favorite character, and this mandala has a lot of significance to the questions about who (and what) she is. Hopefully those remaining questions will be answered in the finale.

The mandala is one of the most artistic images in the show, and one of the ones that has the most impact. Humanity is struggling to survive in a fleet of spaceships that are falling apart. Much of the world of the show is grim and dark and grimy. There is little art, little color other than the bright, blood red lights associated with the Cylons. In contrast, Starbuck’s mandala jumps off the screen with its bold, primitive shape and its bright primary colors.

I didn’t have to think very hard as to what I wanted to do. I wanted to make the mandala out of pulled sugar, and from there I thought rainbow cupcakes could mirror the colors in the sugar decorations, echoing Starbuck’s repeated painting of the symbol on the show and generally looking cool.

The vanilla cupcake recipe I used came from The Whimsical Bakehouse, a fun cake decorating book that I’ve looked at many times but never cooked from. I liked the recipe, especially since it has an easy mixing method that’s different from what I’ve come across in the past. My one complaint is it calls for far too little vanilla. I suspected that was the case, but I’ve had so many problems baking cupcakes lately that I wanted to follow the recipe exactly to be sure they’d turn out. And they did, so I’m happy–very happy!–but next time I’ll at least double up on the vanilla.

The frosting was the one thing I couldn’t decide on until I started making it. It’s lemon meringue flavored. I just made my Swiss meringue recipe and added both orange and lemon extracts to compensate for the mild flavor of the cupcakes. (I learned that orange extract ups the flavor of lemon extract from the Martha Stewart recipe that eventually became the basis for my wedding cake.) I convinced myself that the frosting fit the theme because the mandala foreshadowed a big explosion, and the meringue got torched. A tenuous connection, but enough to go on.

This was the first time I’d played with pulled sugar in years, so I was pretty rusty. The mandalas are very thick–oh, wait, I meant them to be like that. So…they…could be…BSG lollipops. Two sweet treats in one! Right. Well, now that I have all of my equipment located, dusted off and wiped down, I hope to get back into the habit, because it’s one of my favorite things to do, and I used to be able to do it pretty well.

To any other BSG fans out there: what visual images from the show do you remember most vividly? Could you turn them into something edible? If you don’t watch the show, what dish or dessert could you be inspired to make by your favorite TV show?

Other Sugar Work Posts at Pie of the Tiger:
Sugar Work Lesson 1: Casting Sugar
Cadbury Creme Brul’egg
Sugar Work Equipment
Sugar Work (Pastry School Flashbacks)

This past Saturday, I was making the birthday cake for a very dear friend of mine’s birthday party. I wanted it to be spectacular, because the birthday girl is pretty darn spectacular herself. I ended up deciding to do cupcakes, and I set out to do two different flavors as soon as I woke up Saturday morning, a chocolate cupcake recipe from The Modern Baker by Nick Malgieri and a white chocolate cake recipe from Pure Chocolate by Fran Bigelow of Fran’s Chocolates. I’d had success with the devil’s food cake recipe in Malgieri’s book twice last fall, and one of my chefs at pastry school used to work for Fran Bigelow and helped with the production of the photos and drawings in the book (if I remember correctly, the hands in the drawings at the beginning of the book are hers), so I trusted both books to have good recipes.

Now, as I said, I’ve had way too many bad baking days before, and I really wanted to get it right this time. Most of my misadventures in the kitchen have been centered around birthday cakes. I actually swore off making them for a long time, thinking that it was my old, malfunctioning oven’s fault that the cakes never turned out right. Also, I knew that the other main cause for substandard baking is my tendency to cut corners and get lazy when I’m cooking in my own kitchen. This was never a problem in school or at the restaurant or the B&B, so now I make very sure now to do things deliberately and professionally when I bake.

I was off to such a good start. Other than some worry over the way the batter for the chocolate cupcakes turned out, I felt very organized and in control of the situation. The white chocolate cake batter turned out to be gorgeous, this billowing silky mass that I’m guessing is what Cloud 9 must be made out of. But the dark chocolate cupcakes…well, I can’t tell you for sure whose fault the disaster was on that one. Was it the recipe? Was it my paranoia of over baking them? Was it the unsweetened chocolate I used, that was maybe a little past its prime? Without making the recipe again, I can’t say for sure.

The batter was weird, very watery, but I assumed that was because the author’s stated intent was to make very moist cupcakes (they were, indeed, very moist, almost fudgy, which I can’t fault at all). It was very hard to get into the cupcake wrappers cleanly, even pouring it from a measuring cup with a pour spout, because it was so thin it just ran down the outside of the cup as soon as I tipped it downward. The chocolate also was an issue, as it didn’t melt but stayed in little tiny flecks. I wanted to blame the recipe on that one, too, because he instructed to melt it by pouring boiling water over it (and thus, in my mind, creating an environment perfect for the chocolate to seize if it didn’t emulsify right away), but then the same thing happened later with a different recipe and the same chocolate. I feel like I underbaked them, but they were in the oven for ten minutes longer than the recipe said, so…I’m still perplexed.

They looked and smelled beautiful in the oven, but fell when they came out, quickly and drastically. I wish I had a picture of those chocolate sinkholes. I was disappointed, mostly in myself because I knew that’s where the blame should probably land, given my past track record. But then the white chocolate cupcakes went in, and they looked and smelled so beautiful that I wasn’t too worried. After all, cupcakes are easy to hide under mounds of frosting.

Back to the white chocolate variety. I had high hopes these would outshine my failure with the dark chocolate ones. I knew that using a cake batter for cupcakes was risky, but I thought the problem would be overbaking them, not underbaking them. So, once again, I pulled them out way too soon. These, unlike the chocolate ones, ended up being beyond repair, because I waited too long to decide to put them back in the oven and never managed to get them to bake all the way through.

Cue mental breakdown. Tears were shed. Oaths to never bake again were uttered. It wasn’t pretty. Bad baking days never are.

Fortunately, Baker Bee rode up on his white horse (i.e. rolled out of bed) brandishing a shiny whisk and saved me, despite my ranting and raving and general foul mood. While I took a soothing shower, he made another batch of cupcakes, this time using a recipe from our trusty copy of Joy of Cooking, which is where I should have gone for my cupcake recipe. Other than the chocolate not melting properly, his were cupcakes–high rising domes of very cake-ish cake.

I was feeling a bit down in the dumps about my lousy cupcakes. The white chocolate ones, despite tasting fabulous, weren’t something I could serve to anyone (except Baker Bee, who thinks they taste like the perfect pound cake of all things). My chocolate ones were visibly inferior to Mr. Bee’s, which is fine in other areas of cooking but I like to think that I got some sort of useful skills out of pastry school that I can contribute to our kitchen.

Time was running out. I turned to the quickest thing to frost them with that would look impressive: torched meringue. It just looks cool, and it’s one of those things like ganache that really isn’t hard to make at all, but if you don’t know how to make it and brown it you wouldn’t know where to start. We had meringue on my wedding cake and everyone loved it. So I started piping it on Baker Bee’s cupcakes. I played around with it a bit, remembering the way that piping meringue on top of meringue produced an interesting visual contrast. It looked fun and festive, but what would I do to make the fallen cupcakes not look like ugly stepsisters beside them?

Then it came to me. Earlier in the week, I’d had this strong urge to make Obama cupcakes–faux Hostess chocolate cupcakes, but with the white squiggle writing “Obama” in cursive. Not an original idea, but I really wanted to do it…and then didn’t. But on Saturday I had 18 cupcakes with gaping holes staring up at me, and a Kitchen Aid bowl full of Swiss meringue, and…well, you do the math. The fun twist I came up with was to fill the hole with meringue and mound some on the top of the cupcake as well, then torch it before dipping the top in the ganache. That made the meringue a lot more stable, and possibly imparted a hint of toasted marshmallow to the flavor (more research is needed to confirm this). Plus, it made the cupcakes look like they had risen and stayed that way, which wasn’t a bad thing at all.

On some of them, I tried to pipe the white squiggle, but the meringue wasn’t behaving properly when piped that thinly (hence the bad handwriting on the cupcakes…normally, I’m pretty good at that–oh boy, there goes the old ego again), so I just left a lot of them dressed in only their glossy ganache. Baker Bee thinks I should figure out how to make them fall again in the future so I could make filled cupcakes again, and although I pointed out that there are techniques for getting the filling inside the cupcake, I think it might not be a bad idea.

At the party, I stacked them tiered-cake style with the help of a few cake stands. All together, they looked great. Not perfect, but that’s coming from the mouth of a self-critical perfectionist. I was happy with them at the end, and they provided a great sugar high for the rousing round of Cranium and custom vampire-themed Mad Libs. (If you look closely, you’ll see that one of the cupcakes was meant to be a vampire.)

The funny thing is that even though both batches were chocolate cupcakes, and I used the same meringue on both of them, with the only difference being the ganache, they were both very, very different cupcakes, both good in their own way. A lot of people seemed to think my fallen ones with the ganache were better, and they certainly were more intense on the chocolate, but the day after I went to have one bite of Baker Bee’s cupcakes with a huge crown of spiky meringue on it and ended up eating the whole thing.

Here’s the Swiss meringue recipe I use out of my notes from pastry school, in case you’re in need of a good one. The beauty of Swiss meringue as opposed to Italian and French is its stretch, gooey, marshmallowy consistency. Technically, Italian meringue is more stable, but Swiss meringue holds up very well on cakes in my experience, and I love the texture of it. The meringue on the gelato coppetta I wrote about in my last post was undoubtedly Swiss, and I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

Swiss Meringue
(printable version)

Egg whites 8 oz (250 g)
Fine granulated sugar 1 lb (500 g)

Procedure

Place the egg whites and sugar in a stainless steel bowl or in the top of a double boiler. Beat with a whisk (more near the end than at first) over hot water until the mixture is hot about 120°F.* Transfer to the bowl of a mixer and whip at high speed until stiff peaks form. Turn down speed to cool.

* I learned to test the temperature this way from my chef at pastry school: dip your finger in, and if you have to pull your finger out immediately because your cuticles feel like they’re on fire, it’s ready. The warmer the egg and sugar mixture gets, the more stable the meringue will be.

I looked through a couple cookbooks in search of a tasty-yet-portable cake that seemed special enough for Mr. T’s birthday. Nothing seemed appealing to me that looked stable enough for a five hour car ride and didn’t need ingredients I don’t have on hand. I was paging through The Joy of Cooking when I came across a recipe for Black Bottom Cupcakes. I used to make Black Bottom Cupcakes back when I was a pastry cook. Scratch that–I used to de-pan the cupcakes after the baker I assisted made them. Which meant I’d never made them before. After checking that I did have cream cheese in my fridge and considering the superior portability of cupcakes, I decided that tonight I’d fix that–even though I’ve never thought the name “Black Bottom Cupcakes” sounded particularly appetizing, or consistent with the end product, for that matter. The chocolate part isn’t just in the bottom, and I think anything with cream cheese in it should advertise that fact proudly.

All in all, I think they turned out very nicely, and they’re a fairly simple cupcake to whip up despite the fact that you have to make two batters. I think the baker I used to work with must have swirled the cream cheese part around in the chocolate cake batter, because the boundaries between the two are much more clear than I remember hers being. I like the look of mine better, but swirling would probably improve the texture of the cupcake overall by breaking up the rich center a bit.

Where I went wrong: 1) Despite the fact that I know better (out of sheer fear of ruining a huge batch of cream cheese frosting at work when the job fell to me), I got impatient and beat the cream cheese with the sugar before it had warmed up to room temperature. Not a huge problem because I was baking it, but my worst habit in the kitchen is impatience. 2) I baked them for just a little too long, so the edges are a little crisper than I’d like.

Still, the cupcakes are super moist. I’ll definitely make them again.

The Joy of Cooking scores another point. I always feel so domestic turning to it rather than my fancy-shmancy gourmet photo-filled cookbooks.