Banana Cupcakes

Despite getting home on the late side last night, I decided to throw together a quick batch of Banana Cupcakes (from Julie Hasson's 125 Best Cupcakes) for a meeting I need to attend this afternoon. In one of my should-have-known-better moments, I overfilled the cupcake liners a bit, and a few of the cupcakes overflowed, leaving the edges to bake on top of the pan. Subsequently, there was some untoward damage to a few of them during the depanning stage of the process. (When writing about this type of thing, I strive to use passive voice during the "I messed up" portion of the endeavor.)

At the moment, the cupcakes are unfrosted, but I think I can whip up a quick batch of buttercream before the meeting. (I ended up flavoring the buttercream with a little nutmeg, which goes really well with the banana and chocolate.)

Strawberry Cupcakes

Today I brought some (early) Valentine's Day cupcakes to share with Claire's skating teammates. I used the strawberry cupcake recipe from Julie Hasson's 125 Best Cupcake Recipes. I've made that one before, and this time boosted the flavor with a bit of strawberry extract. With some chocolate frosting and sprinkles on top, they were good to go, and seemed to be pretty well enjoyed by everybody.

Pistachio Cupcakes

This week for Lost Lunch Thursday, we'll be having Pistachio Cupcakes, from a recipe in Julie Hasson's 125 Best Cupcake Recipes. They're frosted with a plain buttercream icing from the same book. I usually don't do this sort of thing, but I tinted the icing a light green to emphasize the pistachio theme. The cupcakes call for 1/2 cup of ground pistachios. To prevent them from turning into nut butter in the food processor, I ground them with a heaping 1/4 cup of the flour from the recipe. I'm already looking forward to lunch tomorrow.

Pumpkin Cupcakes

Autumn means that it's time to bake with apples, cranberries, and pumpkin. I had some leftover chocolate frosting from my commission cake, and I thought it would go well with pumpkin. So it turned to Julie Hasson's 125 Best Cupcake Recipes. Good combination. 

Now I need to make something with cranberries.

Every Peanut Butter Cupcake in the Book

For a recent work birthday, I needed to make something that involved chocolate and peanut butter. I'd started to feel that over the years, I'd done all the varieties of things I could make (cakes, pies, ice creams), so this year, I opted for cupcakes. When I perused Julie Hasson's 125 Best Cupcake Recipes, I ended up deciding to make all four of the peanut butter-chocolate cupcake recipes. Each one made a dozen cupcakes, so I was sure to have leftovers. I made a double batch of her peanut butter frosting for half of the cupcakes; for the other half, I used a chocolate buttercream.

Cupcakes to Go

In early April, we went along with the Girl Scout troop for Scouts' Day at Old Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts. To make the drive home a bit more pleasant, I brought along a few batches of cupcakes. I made a batch of the Pretty in Pink strawberry cupcakes from Julie Hasson's 125 Best Cupcake Recipes. Also from that book, I made a batch of chocolate cupcakes with vanilla buttercream. Finally, there was a batch of Banana-Butterscotch Cupcakes from Elinor Klivans's Cupcakes!. Good choices all.

Lemon-Cranberry Cupcakes

These cupcakes are another recipe from Julie Hasson's 125 Best Cupcake Recipes. Pretty good, although I would be tempted to bump up the lemon flavor a bit with some extract or lemon oil. They are topped with a ginger-cream cheese frosting.

Banana Cupcakes

Faced yet again with a bunch of overripe bananas, I made a batch of Banana Cupcakes using a recipe in Julie Hasson's 125 Best Cupcake Recipes. These cupcakes are finished off with a topping of Chocolate Fudge Frosting from the same cookbook. Pretty straightforward stuff, and a good banana cupcake recipe.

Bundt Cake

Usually when a new magazine arrives, I turn the pages, think "Hey, I need to make this one at some point," then put it aside and forget about it. When the October 2007 issue of Bon Appétit arrived, I took a look at the dessert feature by Julie Hasson and had to make Brown Sugar and Chocolate Chip Pound Cake with Maple-Espresso Glaze later that day. I ended up bringing the cake along for our weekend in New Hampshire for the Reach the Beach relay, and we managed to devour most of it in a couple of days. It seemed to be a big hit. From a baker's perspective, the only minor quibble I had was that the chocolate chips seemed to sink in the batter. Maybe next time I'll make it with mini-chips.

Strawberry Cupcakes, Part 2

I finally got around to experimenting with the Pretty in Pink Cupcake recipe from Julie Hasson's 125 Best Cupcake Recipes. My first attempt at boosting the strawberry flavor was using jarred strawberries in light syrup instead of "fresh" strawberries. The result? The cupcakes were much pinker (thanks, red food dye!), but oddly enough, they had less strawberry flavor than the cupcakes made with the red yet styrofoamesque fresh berries. Shrug. I think they're going to need extract or some other flavor booster, as Julie suggested earlier. I am going to try one more thing: rehydrating some dried strawberries, then pureeing them with fresh berries.

In the meantime, I'll have to order strawberry extract because it's impossible to find in stores in my area. In my hunt for strawberry extract, I found lime, various mints, and even ginger extracts. But no strawberry. Ginger extract is the sort of thing that gives me ideas, though.

Also in the meantime, I'm going to use the Pretty in Pink Cupcake formula for a batch of raspberry cupcakes. I was able to purchase raspberry extract, and California raspberries have been on sale here for the past week. I think they would be terrific topped with a fudge icing.

More Cupcakes

I am in a cupcake groove. After the very good Apple Crisp Cupcakes from Julie Hasson's book 125 Best Cupcake Recipes, I took a dive in and came back with a batch of Pistachio Cupcakes and a batch of Pretty in Pink Cupcakes (flavored with pureed strawberries). Both batches of cupcakes baked up perfectly.

The Pistachio Cupcakes were my immediate favorite of the two. The pistachio flavor is subtle but nice, and probably would be enhanced with a garnish of some chopped pistachios on top of the plain buttercream frosting.

The strawberry cupcakes were a bit more problematic. Because strawberries aren't in season here (Connecticut) yet, what we're getting is stuff imported from California and Florida. To make these berries stable for long-term travel, they've pretty much been hybridized for size and color to the detriment of Actual Strawberry Flavor. At first taste, the Pretty in Pink Cupcakes were OK, but frustrating. I wanted strawberry flavor. That got me to thinking about ways I could tweak the recipe to boost the strawberry flavor. I've got about four ideas going, and I'm going to be testing them out over the next few days. Stay tuned. (At this point, the necessity of mowing the backyard is taking precedence over virtually any other activity I can think of, so I don't think I'll be recipe-testing tonight.)

I am sure that I'll be making more recipes from this cupcake book. I'm not sure why I've let it languish on the bookshelf for so long.

Apple Crisp Cupcakes

I know apple season is long gone, but I had purchased a few apples with the idea of making an apple Bundt cake a couple of weeks ago. That notion came and went, but the apples lingered on. Consequently, after deciding that cupcakes would be ideal for "Lost" Lunch Thursday, I browsed through Julie Hasson's 125 Best Cupcake Recipes for ideas, and found something appealing: Apple Crisp Cupcakes.

I've had really good results from other recipes in this book. Additionally, I love that most of the recipes are scaled to make only a dozen cupcakes. That seems like just enough. The Apple Crisp Cupcakes turned out extremely well. Based on a simple batter containing pieces of diced apple, the cupcakes have a ripple of streusel running through their centers. (That effect is created by putting a bit of batter in the cupcake liner, then sprinkling on some streusel, then topping off with a bit more batter.) Julie recommends Cream Cheese Icing for these cupcakes, so I went with it. They're so moist and flavorful that I suspect they could go without frosting at all, but the frosting makes a nice touch.