Adventures in Cupcakes, Part I

I love cupcakes, but it’s hard to find good ones. The recent cupcake boom doesn’t seem to be very good for cupcakes much as the bagel boom wasn’t very good for bagels... but that’s for another time). For example, I’ve been disappointed by local bakery Kickass Cupcakes, whose cupcakes resolutely fail to kick ass.

Unfortunately, I’ve had similar problems finding a good cupcake recipe for baking at home, despite an antiquated copy of The Joy of Cooking on my shelf and my subscription to Cook’s Illustrated.

For my birthday, a dear friend bought me a copy of Nigella Lawson’s How To Be A Domestic Goddess , a baking cookbook with several recipes for cupcakes and fairy cakes (the difference escapes me; it’s a British distinction which does not seem to exist in American English). So last week I made three batches of cupcakes: one for a friend’s potluck going away party, one for Laura’s birthday, and one for the lab potluck holiday party. For the first two, I made espresso cupcakes, which are chocolate with coffee (espresso powder in the recipe, finely ground coffee for me), while for the third batch, I made burnt-butter brown-sugar cupcakes.

The book was published in the UK, so there were a few conversion issues to deal with first. Dry ingredients are listed in terms of weight, rather than volume, which appears to be customary in the UK, and probably better practice overall, since the volume of a given weight of flour will vary with humidity and so forth. Luckily, I have a kitchen scale (a hand-me-down from Elisabeth, no less!) denominated in both metric and conventional measures. Interestingly, Lawson gives volume measures in terms of tablespoons and teaspoons, not ml, which is good, since I don’t have metric measuring spoons!

Next, the ingredients are a bit different. I had to educate myself about sugars. Instead of granulated sugar and brown sugar, the recipes call for “caster sugar” and “muscovedo sugar”. Caster sugar turns out to be a superfine sugar, but not as fine as what we call “powdered sugar”. It’s available in supermarkets. Muscovedo is an unrefined brown sugar. According to my research, American brown sugar is made by adding molasses back in to refined sugar, while muscovedo is made by not taking it out in the first place. The two sugars are not interchangeable, because muscovedo brings more moisture. It also comes in light and dark varieties. Anyway, a trip to Whole Foods for exotic sugars was required. I suppose I could have just tried the recipes with the sugars more widely available here, but I try to be precise about baking projects whenever possible.

Then there was the “self-raising flour”. A trip to the web helpfully informed me that the American translation is “self-rising flour”, but that didn’t really do much good, since supermarkets in my area don’t seem to carry that. A bit of Internet research revealed that "self-raising/rising" flour is flour which has been premixed with baking powder and salt. The purpose for such a product escapes me; is it really that difficult to mix in baking powder yourself? Anyway, you can make your own by mixing in 1.5 teaspoons of baking powder and .25 teaspoons salt per cup of flour (actually, recommendations vary by about a quarter teaspoon for both ingredients, but this is what I used. I have no idea how this compares to what Lawson used). As it happens, 125 g of flour turns out to be ~1 cup, so that worked out well.

Before the recipes, a couple of notes. First, these are “adult” cupcakes, not in the sense that suitable for bachelor parties, but in that they are aimed at adult tastes. You probably don’t want to send them with your child for the fourth grade bake sale. Second, they’re a little on the dry side. My current hypothesis is that this is because they are made in the food processor. I’ll give them a whirl in the mixer for Part II and tell you what happens. Third, tasters have described them as “one note”, in that the icing is the same flavor as the cake. Again, in Part II I think I’ll mix up the flavors and see what happens!

espresso cupcakes

125 g soft unsalted butter
125 g dark muscovedo sugar
2 large eggs
125 g self-raising flour
1 tablespoon cocoa powder
1 tablespoon espresso coffee powder (or finely ground coffee)
50 g dark chocolate, melted (1-2 minutes in microwave should do it)
2 tablespoons milk

icing
300 g dark chocolate
50 g unsalted butter
2 teaspoons instant espresso coffee powder (or finely ground coffee)

put liners in a 12 muffin tin
preheat the oven to 200°C/gas mark 6 (aka 400°F)

Pulse butter and sugar in the food processor, then add eggs and pulse again. Add flour, cocoa, and coffee, and process until you have a smooth batter. Then add the chocolate and milk, pulse again, then distribute evenly into cupcake liners. Bake for 15-20 minutes. As soon as the cakes are cool enough to be handled, remove them from the tin to finish cooling on a rack.

In the meantime, make the icing. Put chocolate, butter, and coffee together in a large bowl and microwave until chocolate and butter are melted (again, approximately 2 minutes, depending on your microwave). Whisk together to combine, then spread on top of cooled muffins (here Lawson suggests lopping off the top of the cake to make a flat surface, but this strikes me as a foolish waste of cake). There’s a lot of icing in this recipe, I found, so you can layer it on thickly, or maybe make two batches of cupcakes to one batch of icing!

burnt-butter brown-sugar cupcakes

150 g unsalted butter
125 g self-raising flour
60 g caster sugar (Lawson actually calls for golden caster sugar here, whatever that is, but I doubt it makes a difference)
65 g light muscovedo sugar
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon baking powder
3 tablespoons milk

icing
150 g unsalted butter
250-300 g golden icing sugar, sieved (for this I substituted powdered sugar to no ill effect)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
3 tablespoons milk

put liners in a 12 muffin tin
preheat the oven to 200°C/gas mark 6 (aka 400°F)

First, we burn the butter! Put the butter in a small saucepan over medium heat, and stir continuously until the butter turns a dark golden color. Strain the burnt butter through cheesecloth into a small bowl. Let it cool and solidify, but do not put it in the refrigerator. Lawson writes, "This shouldn't take long, except in hot weather, in which case leave the preheating of the oven till after the butter's been burnt." Halfway through a New England December, with the thermostat set at 65F, I found that it took around an hour to solidify. I find it's best to walk the dog while waiting for the butter to solidify. In light of this, I recommend making the burnt butter for the icing at the same time, assuming you're going to make the accompanying icing recipe.

When the butter is "solid but still soft", put all of the cake ingredients except the milk in a food processor and process (or, when in the UK, "blitz") to a smooth batter. Then add the milk in gradually through the feed tube while pulsing. Distribute into the liners and bake for 15-20 minutes.

Icing

Beat the solidified butter with half the sugar until stiff. Then alternate between adding milk and sugar until you reach the desired consistency, then beat in the vanilla. Spread on cooled cupcakes.