Archive for January, 2011
Marble cakes and cupcakes are usually made by swirling together vanilla and chocolate cake batters, but there is no reason that you can’t swirl together other flavors of cake to create different looks and add different flavors to a finished product. Red velvet cake batter is great for swirling into marble cakes because it lends such a vibrant color to the finished product, but it isn’t often seen in marble cakes.
Red velvet cake is usually a buttermilk cake with a hint of cocoa powder and some red food coloring. This recipe for marble cake starts out with a vanilla buttermilk cupcake batter, so I simply had to divide the batter and add a bit of cocoa powder and food coloring to a portion of it to transform it into red velvet. It is great when you don’t have to make two separate batters just to make a marble cake because it really streamlines the whole baking process. Gel food coloring is going to give you the very brightest red color, but regular food coloring works just as well (and that is what I used in this recipe). The amount doesn’t have to be exact, although I would err towards adding a few extra drops of coloring to ensure that you get that bright red color just to be on the safe side.
The finished cupcakes have a beautiful red and white swirled look to them, and you get the flavor of the buttery vanilla cake as well as the slightly chocolatey red velvet. The cupcakes are very moist and tender, too. I topped mine off with a vanilla cream cheese frosting, which is often paired with red velvet cakes (and is yummy, to boot!). These cupcakes are a wonderful treat for any occasion, but if you put them into some red or pink cupcake wrappers, they just might be the perfect treat for your Valentine, as well.
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Over the past couple of years, the importance of having whole grains in our diets has been repeatedly emphasized, with the result that whole grains are now being incorporated into things – such as baked goods – that they hadn’t been a part of before. Whole wheat flour is a standby now for many bakers, a item to stock on the pantry alongside bread or all purpose flour. But there are a lot of other flours out there and Good to the Grain: Baking with Whole-Grain Flours introduces many new ways to use things like amaranth flour, oat flour and spelt flour.
The cookbook is divided up into chapters by whole grain flour type, so in each chapter you’ll get a set of recipes that all utilize the same ingredient. The recipes themselves vary widely by type, so you’ll see recipes for yeast breads, cookies, tarts and cakes in every chapter. The book also starts off with an introductory section that discusses baking techniques in general as well as how to work with the specialty flours called for in the recipes, and of course each of the whole grains is well described. The book is beautiful to look at, with lots of lovely photos, and the recipes are clearly written in a way that will make you feel comfortable working with some of these unfamiliar ingredients. A book like this would have seemed quite exotic just a few years ago, but now even major supermarkets are stocking a bigger variety of whole grain flours on their shelves and that availability makes these recipes more accessible to home bakers.
Another thing that makes these recipes accessible is that many of them continue to use at least a portion of all purpose flour as a blend with their specialty flours. Using wheat flour as a building block in these recipes means that the finished baked goods will share a lot of the same textures and structure as regular baked goods, with the added benefit of having extra whole grains, unlike completely gluten free recipes that often have a somewhat different texture in the end or rely on outside binding agents to act like gluten in the recipes.
It is fun to experiment with different types of cookies, cakes and other baked goods but when it comes down to it, it has hard to beat a classic chocolate chip cookie. The combination of butter, sugar and chocolate all comes together in just the perfect proportions to make a perfectly satisfying treat. I confess that I will go for months at a time without baking a batch of chocolate chip cookies because they’re something of a stand-by recipe that doesn’t always jump out at me – but when I catch myself in a lapse like this, they always go straight to the top of my “to-bake” list. A fresh-from-the-oven chocolate chip cookie really can’t be beat.
These are actually Brown Sugar Chocolate Chunk Cookies. Chocolate chunks – I used Callebaut semisweet this time around – are slightly larger than chocolate chips and seem to give a little more chocolate flavor, as well as a slightly more rustic look, to the cookies. I use only brown sugar in these cookies, which gives them a deeper flavor. Golden brown sugar or light brown sugar is going to give your cookies a note of honey, while dark brown sugar will lend a hint of molasses. Both types of sugar will produce great results.
These cookies are crisp around the edges and chewy in the middle. You can underbake them by a minute to make them even chewier, or add an addition two minutes to turn them into much crisper cookies. Any way you bake them, you’ll get a delicious and well balanced cookie with flavors of brown sugar, vanilla, butter and lots of chocolate. Make sure to eat one fresh from the oven!
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Cream filled cupcakes are not difficult to make. All you need to do is hollow out the core of a baked cupcake using a paring knife or a cupcake corer and pipe in your filling. If you would rather have the pan do the work for you, than Nordicware’s Filled Cupcakes Pan might just be the perfect pan to add to your collection.
This pan bakes up super cute cupcakes in two parts: the base and the top. The base has a shallow dish on one side that can be filled with the filling of your choice, The top of each cupcake is a swirling cone and the two pieces stack together to create an adorable double-sized cupcake made entirely of cake. You can frost the top portion of each cake cupcake to finish off your creations, but you’ll have some visually impressive desserts even if you don’t! The pan is made from heavy-duty cast aluminum and has a nonstick finish, so your cupcakes should pop right out without any need for cupcake wrappers. You won’t get quite as much filling in these as with the homemade filled cupcake method, but you will end up with a bigger cupcake and a great looking finished product.
At Cook’s Country, there are several features that they they look for in muffin tins and two are non-negotiable. They want muffin tins that have a nonstick coating for easy releases and easy cleanup, and they prefer tins that have handles or extended edges that make them easy to grab with pot holders on. In their most recent issue (Feb/Mar 2011), they rounded up a total of eight muffin pans that met their criteria and put them to the test, with batches of blueberry streusel muffins, corn muffins and vanilla cupcakes to see which pans would work out best.
This test went well because none of the tins performed poorly, but some performed better than others, turning out muffins that were cleaner, more evenly browned and more “professional” looking than others. There were four pans that came out of the test with a “recommended” designation. These included the Wilton Avanti Everglide, Norpro Nonstick Cupcake Pan, Anolon Advanced Muffin Pan, and the Bonjour Commercial Nonstick Muffin Pan.
The Wilton pan is the test kitchen’s preferred pan at the end of the day because it was easiest to grip and was priced right at $13.00. The Norpro pan got dinged for not having quite as easy a grip, but slightly out-performed the Wilton in browning and the shape of the finished baked goods. But whichever you choose, these pans all worked well and will turn out beautiful muffins.
