My Food Geek

Random fact: I’ve never made cupcakes. I’m not quite sure why, but I usually shy away from them. Maybe they seemed too basic, maybe I just didn’t see all the fanciful flavors of cupcakes out there these days, or maybe I just never had a decent reason. This week was different.

Usually I like to try and find some recipe of a food or pastry I either can’t find locally or something that I can make better than the pathetic supermarket offerings out there. Sometimes it’s macarons, other times it’s puff pastry, and sometimes I just want a decent home made bread. This time around I wanted to see what all the fuss was about cupcakes.

Cupcakes have apparently become quite the high-class food. There are shops in cities around the US that will make you stand in line and gladly charge you five bucks for the privilege of eating their cupcake masterpieces. I’m all for fancy new foods, but I never thought cupcakes were going to get this sort of treatment. I’m finding out how wrong I was.

I wanted to create my own cupcake masterpiece but I thought that I should at least look at some of the masters out there. There are plenty of cupcake chicks on the Daring Bakers Blogroll, at least one of them must have come up with something exciting, right? I spent a few hours reading all about these daring cupcakes. I was still amazed at all the flavor combinations, frosting types, and presentations for the lowly cupcake. After much research, I found one I liked.

A fellow baker, Chockylit has a site with nothing but cupcakes. Photos, frostings, tips, recipes, she has everything you’d ever want if you were going to make cupcakes (like me). I was intrigued by her recipe for Chocolate Chai cupcakes.

Her basic cupcake recipe was, well, basic. There was nothing really fancy here — no separating eggs, no sifting flour, no whipping meringue, no folding batters — how could this be? I read and re-read the recipe just to make sure and then decide to just give it a go.

Sure enough it was every bit as easy as it was written. Everything came together just as it should. I piped 12 mini cupcakes and 6 regular cupcakes and was amazed at how much leftover I had, even AFTER halving the recipe. I decided to take a chance and just let the batter sit while the cupcakes cooked. Twenty-five minutes later the cupcakes emerged from the oven, puffed up all nice and ready to go. I removed the mini’s from my silicone pan and refitted it with new cups and piped another batch and there was still more batter left. Batch two looked just as good as batch one so I finished one more round of six this time and baked them off as well.

While everything was cooling off I assembled the frosting. This was another first for me: American buttercream. Funny that I’ve never made an American buttercream yet I’ve made Swiss, French and Italian buttercream. Of course I would have to screw something up on my first shot and this was it. I got too anxious and just threw all the ingredients together and whipped them in the kitchenaide. My multi-temperatured ingredients did not want to properly mix and I was left with a broken mess.

I search around a little bit and realized everything needed to be at the same temperature to emulsify properly. Everything went back in the mixer and I whipped them to a frenzy and got it smooth enough to use. After piping about a dozen cupcakes it started to break again, probably from my warms hands or probably from my rushed technique.

I think they came out pretty good. The eater wasn’t a big fan of the frosting but cake and frosting aren’t really her thing. I tested a dozen of these on my coworkers and the cupcakes quickly disappeared. They got good reviews all around, even by the non-chai loving coworker of mine.

Have I been converted to a cupcake lover? Possibly. There will need to be a few more experiments carried — stay tuned!

A quick thanks to all the Daring Bakers that have welcomed me to the Eta Class. Also, the macaron post will be coming soon, I’m just fixing photos, writing, etc.

I’ve been having a hard time consistently writing posts these days so I thought I’d change things up and report on what’s happening at the food geek household this weekend.

I’ve been bitten by the macaron bug again. After seeing Brilynn post on her macarons and the problems she encountered and the renewed interest in a previous macaron post of mine, I have decided to make several batches this week and try out a new method or two. I’m hoping to get a recipe to work consistently but I’m not expecting any miracles.

The ice cream machine will be back in action this weekend! I bought some new, pint sized, containers and they need to be filled up. Frozen yogurt will be my main focus this week; I’m hoping to come up with a decent chocolate frozen yogurt recipe.

In other news, I am now the second male member of the Daring Bakers. I didn’t get accepted in time to participate in the May challenge but June is quickly approaching and I will finally be able to compete share with the group. If I have some extra time this weekend, I will try to come up with a male version of this graphic. I got some help on the side, but here’s the new graphic:

Some foodgeek math for you:

Peanuts + popped popcorn + buttery caramel = crackerjackjef.
Divide the whole equation by 2 foodgeeks, you get zero.

I whipped up this quick batch of caramel corn with the intentions of having snacks for a few days, boy was I mistaken. You may as well just call this stuff crack, it’s that addictive. Five cups of popcorn slathered with caramel lasted a little under 12 hours I think, and that is only because I exercised restraint (and had to sleep a little bit).

The recipe, oddly enough, came from Making Artisan Chocolates. This recipe was marked easy, and it showed; the whole recipe took about as long as it took to pop the popcorn. I skipped the final chocolate step, piping thin chocolate stripes on the finished caramel corn, but it wasn’t missed. I think the book just added chocolate to stay on topic, but who knows, it could have been a welcome addition.

I don’t quite feel right about posting the recipe straight from the book. This book has more than enough good recipes in it to warrant the purchase and it’s cheap, too! (see above)

It has been a slow few weeks here at the foodgeek household. The CSA seems to be sending out the last of the winter vegetables, I’m making the same old food as always, and I’ve been slacking off on posting. I’m pretty sure this is all normal foodblogging news as it happens to the best of you out there.

To spark my interest, I bought a few goodies. Last week I got a huge box in the mail. In the box was my new Cuisinart ICE-50BC ice cream maker. This is a pretty big upgrade over my last machine, the ICE-20. The ICE-50BC doesn’t require prefreezing of the work bowl and can crank out batch after batch of ice cream. I’ve tested out the machine with a few flavors: matcha, hazelnut praline, and David Leibovitz’s roasted banana.

That brings me to yet another purchase, The Perfect Scoop. I figured I should support a fellow foodblogger since I would hope people would support me, too. The book is far better than I hoped and has all sorts of new recipes I’m eager to try out.

Switching gears, I purchased a large supply of chocolate from Chocosphere, 22lbs to be exact. I was tired of running over to Whole Foods and picking up their overprices block pieces, so I pulled the trigger on a chocolate stash of my own. In the almost as huge box as the ICE-50BC was a 10lb block of E.Guittard 35% milk chocolate, a 10lb block of E.Guittard High Sierra white chocolate, a 2lb block of Dagoba 35% organic milk chocolate, and a 2lb bag of Dagoba organic cocoa butter. This should hold me over for the better part of the year unless I go on a serious chocolate bender.

I bought one last thing to go along with all that chocolate, Andrew Shotts’ Making Artisan Chocolates. I’ve been looking for a quality candy book and I think this one fits the bill. Truffles, hand-dipped chocolates, and molded chocolates are the majority of the book. Shotts doesn’t go overboard on techniques and doesn’t stray too far from the topics at hand. The recipes are all rated by difficulty, which is a big help when you’re trying out something unfamiliar. I’ve already tackled a few recipes and hope to share a few of them with you soon.

Finally, I’d like to apologize to the UPS man. Thanks for hauling all that loot to my second story condo. If I have any goodies the next time you arrive, I’ll be sure to offer you some.

another try at making candies, this time I’m armed with a secret weapon!

The eater got me a very cool gift for Christmas that I really haven’t used all that much: The Chocovision Revolation 1. For those of you that aren’t super-foodies, the Revolation is a chocolate tempering machine. It is the little brother of the Revolation X3210 professional model, but don’t let that fool you, this little guy gets it done. It will melt up to two pounds of chocolate, temper it for you automatically, and keep your chocolate tempered for well over an hour or so.

When I temper chocolate by hand I never seem to have problems getting the chocolate tempered properly; my problems usually come from trying to use the tempered chocolate. Even with the best of setups I always seem to have problems dipping candies or filling molds or keeping all of the stray chocolate off of me. The Revolation probably takes a little bit of the art out chocolate making, but I’m not complaining.

Over the weekend I made several varieties of candies but I think I went a little overboard this time. I managed to come up with macadamia nut turtles, dark chocolate-matcha ganache truffles, white chocolate-coconut ganache truffles, and chocolate covered caramels. I really intended to make more, but the candy supply started to get out of hand.

Although I made too many plenty of candies, they did not turn out exactly how I expected. The chocolate I used to coat the candies is a bit on the bitter dark side. While this isn’t a bad thing, I don’t think it paired well with the matcha ganache or the macadamia nut turtles. The white chocolate ganache had all sorts of problems staying firm enough to coat. The real winner out of the entire batch was the caramels.

Since this was yet another chocolate making experiment and my ganaches didn’t work out as I intended, I’m going to forgo the recipes this time. After we manage to eat about all one hundred or so of these, I’ll try another batch and refine the recipe. Here’s a parting shot of all the candies in reserve:

For those who are looking for more on chocolates:

• David Lebovitz writes about his Paris chocolate adventures
• Chocolate Alchemy writes about making artisan chocolate in the Pacific NW
• Artisans Sweets writes about her boutique candies and pastries