Getting Creative

Today, the air is once again pretty frigid. Especially in the house. Luckily, I am obsessed with the fireplace. Once we do turn on the heat, having fires quickly becomes a waste of money, so I plan to enjoy them as much as possible in the meantime.

I just wanted to share quickly today's baking venture. I decided to make homemade cupcakes, but since Paul and I are cutting back on the sweets, I also decided to pass them off on the neighbors this afternoon. I had a limited amount of baking supplies on hand, but I found some recipes that worked well with what I had. These were actually super easy, so once you know you can make delicious devil's food cakes without a box mix, it's hard to go back. Enjoy!

Little Devil's Food Cakes (recipe from a food network kitchens cookbook)

Ingrediants
1 cup all-purpose flour (I used 1 cup + 2 T cake flour)  
6 tablespoons natural unsweetened cocoa
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1 stick of butter, softened
1 cup of sugar
2 large eggs at room temperature (just realized I only used 1 large egg, and it was straight out of the fridge)
1 large egg yolk at room temperature (again, straight from the fridge)
1 teaspoon of pure (Dominican) vanilla extract (just kidding about the Dominican. Unless you have copious amounts of it, as I do.)
1/2 cup water

What to do
1. Preheat oven to 350. Line muffin tin with 12 papers. Whisk flour, cocoa powder, baking soda, baking powder, and salt in a medium bowl.
2. Beat butter with an electric mixer until smooth in a large bowl. Increase speed and gradually add the sugar. Beat until light and smooth. Reduce speed to medium low and add the whole eggs and yolk one at a time, incorporating each fully before adding the next. Beat in vanilla. Scrape down sides of bowl.
3. Bring water just to a boil. With mixer at a low speed, beat flour mixture into butter mixture in several additions. Drizzle in hot water and mix until a smooth batter forms. Divide batter among muffin cups - about 2/3 full for each. Bake until cakes spring back when pressed gently. It took mine 23 minutes. Cool in the tin on a rack for 10 minutes then remove and let cool completely.

Chocolate Cream Cheese Icing (adapted from cupcakeproject.com)

makes enough for 12 cupcakes
(also makes a mess if you're not careful)

Ingrediants
a little more than 1/8 cup of butter, room temp
3 ounces of cream cheese, room temp
2 cups of powdered sugar (it will be pretty stiff, so adjust as you please)
1/4 cup cocoa powder

What to do
1. Mix the cream cheese and butter on medium speed until well blended and smooth.
2. Gradually add in powdered sugar.
3. Mix in cocoa powder.
4. Lick the mixer.

After that...Voila! Now, I did eat just one, but only because I had to be sure they were as delicious as they looked before I hand them off to the neighbors.

Again, I really didn't find that these took much longer than using a box mix, and I had all of these little random supplies just waiting to be used. The tops of the cupcakes have a really nice crunch to them but the insides are completely soft and heavenly. Let me know how they turn out for you!

Now, I should probably hang out with Jillian for my daily punishment to account for all of the cupcake batter/icing/actual cupcake that I consumed during this process. I so love/hate her.