When St. Patrick’s Day comes around every year, I usually follow a little tradition that involves making up a batch of soda bread, a dish involving cabbage or corned beef, and maybe drinking a bottle of Guinness, too. Nothing fancy and pretty standard, as far as celebration goes. This year, I didn’t want to get stuck in that rut, but I did want to do a little something to acknowledge the holiday in my own way - with baked goods, of course. A quick look through my cabinets uncovered my bottle of Bailey’s Mint Chocolate Irish Cream and I knew what I wanted do make.

These cupcakes are a riff on mint chocolate chip ice cream, which is typically colored green, with a generous amount of Bailey’s for character. I neglected to add food coloring to my cupcakes, but feel free to do so if you really want them looking green for the holiday; if you want to avoid food coloring, rest assured that the Irish Cream is more than enough “irish” to make these an acceptable St. Patrick’s day dessert.

The cupcakes are a tiny bit more substantial than the ultra-fluffy cupcakes that I usually aim to bake because I needed them to be able to support the weight of the chocolate chips for good distribution. Mini chocolate chips worked out perfectly and were found in every bite of the cake. The flavor of the Bailey’s was relatively subtle, but definitely carried through into the cake. Regular Bailey’s will work fine in this recipe, although the Bailey’s Mint Chocolate Irish Cream I used will work out even better because it adds another layer of chocolate mint to the cupcake.

Aside from the Bailey’s, the cakes themselves don’t have any mint in them. The majority of the mint flavor comes from some sweet and potent frosting that is spread on top of the cakes. I think that the cakes taste best without mint in them and the clarity of the mint flavor really comes through exceptionally well in the frosting. The chocolate drizzle on top ofthe cupcakes is made with unsweetened chocolate. Don’t worry about it being too bitter, though. It balances well with the sweet mint frosting and prevents the whole dessert from being too sweet. And besides, there is only a very small amount on top of each cupcake.

I made both mini cupcakes and regular ones with this recipe. If you bake all minis, you’ll get 48 bite-sized cupcakes. If you bake all full-sized cakes, you’ll get 16. Baking time for the minis is 10-12 minutes. Baking time for regular size is 18-21 minutes. For me, the full sized cakes were gorgeous, but the minis got eaten up much faster. You can’t go wrong with either size.

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 Dark chocolate, milk chocolate, semisweet chocolate, chocolate chip… is white chocolate the least commonly used chocolate in baking? Sometimes it seems that way, and while the sweeter chocolate isn’t everyone’s go-to chocolate, it does have a lot to offer in some dishes. As evidence, I offer up these white chocolate cupcakes. They have a delicious white chocolate flavor - milky and sweet, with vanilla highlights - and a perfectly moist and fluffy texture. They’re definitely something I’ll make again and again - which isn’t bad for the black sheep (white sheep?) of the chocolate family.

I used Ghiradelli white chocolate (conveniently sold in large blocks at Trader Joe’s) in this recipe and incorporated the melted chocolate into the cupcake batter. I cut back on the amount of sugar I might normally use in cupcakes to take into account the relatively high sweetness of the chocolate, but added eggs, butter and other standard cupcake batter add-ins.

I experimented a bit with the baking time for this recipe, too. When baked at 350F for 15 minutes or so, the cupcakes god a nice dome to them, but browned too quickly on the sides and bottom - a not uncommon result with a higher sugar/higher fat baked good, where the two substances caramelize and brown at higher temperatures more readily. In the end, I reduced the oven temperature and kept the cupcakes relatively small by dividing the batter into 18 muffin cups. These were more flat than domed, but they kept the moistness that I was looking for without overbrowning. Besides, flat tops are actually easier to decorate than large domed ones!

The frosting is a cream cheese and butter based one, with only a little white chocolate added for flavor. I didn’t want to have too much chocolate in the frosting because I felt it would be too sweet; cream cheese cut the sweetness of the chocolate perfectly and gave the frosting a very creamy texture. The hearts on top of the cakes are jumbo Necco Sweethearts. I sorted through an entire bag to find ones with legible messages and it was worth the effort when the tray of finished cupcakes looked stunning. If you don’t care for the Necco candies, however, you can use any kind of sprinkles or just keep the frosting plain.

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‘Tis the season for eggnog, that nutmeg-spiced, custardy, boozy beverage that is so popular around the holidays. It tastes delicious and is oh-so-rich. The richness, unfortunately, keeps me and most of my friends from drinking more than a very small serving at a time. To further enjoy that eggnog flavor, I decided to turn the drink into a batch of holiday cupcakes.

My first impulse was to do a regular cupcake recipe, substituting eggnog for milk and adding in nutmeg to punch up the flavor, but in the nick of time, I remembered the great success I had with the Margarita Cupcake recipe from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the Worldearlier this year and decided to adapt it into eggnog cupcakes. The thing that further influenced my decison was that last year I did a taste testof soy eggnog (a.k.a. “snog”) vs regular eggnog and found that I quite liked the soy versions. The eggnog flavor covers up some the mild flavor commonly associated with soymilk and the drink still has a nice, creamy consistency. My two recommended brands would be Vitasoy Holly Nog and Silk Soy Nog.

The cupcakes turned out beautifully. They were incredbly moist and tender - and because of it, they did the drink justice very nicely. My preference is for rum in eggnog instead of bourbon, so I used quite a bit of rum in both the cakes and the frosting. The rum paired nicely with the nutmeg and the combination of cake, frosting, rum and eggnog was incredibly flavorful.

I want to note that I served these at a party and no one suspected that they might be vegan cupcakes; everyone simply raved about how tasty and eggnoggy they were. I used butter in my frosting (not vegan, obviously), but if you want a vegan version, use a vegan shortening or similar product in its place. If you don’t want to buy the soy nog, or can’t find it in a store near you, this recipe will work with “real” eggnog as well. I recommend opting for a low fat version because it will have a similar consistency to the soy nogs, and while the flavor of the finished cupcake might be slightly different (and not vegan, of course), it will still be delicious.

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When I made my big batch of cranberry applesauce last week, I wasn’t sure what do do with all of it. I’m not really into canning and, when I make something like applesauce or jam, I prefer just to work my way through it right away. Jam is more limited in its uses, but applesauce can have a variety of applications beyond being a simple side dish. In this case, I used up some of that applesauce to make cupcakes.

Applesauce is often used as a fat replacer in recipes and, as such, it kind of has a bad rap. There are too many baked goods that are mushy or dense because applesauce has been used overgenerously. These cupcakes, however, do not use applesauce as a fat replacer. Instead, the applesauce is one of the primary flavoring agents of the cake - rather like how carrots are used in carrot cake. As a result, these cupcakes have a very light texture and a tender crumb, which is exactly what you want to have in a cupcake. They are moist, but not overly wet or dense by a long shot.

The cupcakes are practically the epitome of fall. Every flavor in them reminds me of the season: the spices, the cranberries, the apples. Each element comes through in the finished baked good. If pecans are a big fall favorite, you can add some of them into the batter, as well, or use a large piece to garnish the top of each cake.

I really loved the glaze on top of these cupcakes, since I reminded me - especially in flavor - of tart tatin or other caramelized apple dishes. It’s not a really thick glaze, so it will probably run down the sides of the cupcakes; keep some napkins on hand when you’re serving. If you want a thicker layer, glaze the cupcakes, let the glaze set, then reglaze them. (more…)

It was a dark and stormy (read: there was a heavy drizzle) night when a discussion of Halloween costumes let to a discussion on Halloween baked goods. I already had a spiderweb chocolate tart and some pumpkin muffins planned, but I wanted to come up with something dramatic. Something impressive. Something that a dark and spooky holiday - albeit a candy-centric one - deserved. And something that involved vampires, since a good vampire costume is always my favorite at Halloween.

Vampire cupcakes sounded perfect.

I knew I wanted a white cupcake (vampires are pale, after all) and had a recipe in mind to use already. The question that remained to be answered was how I was going to decorate it. There are a ton of articles, primarily in family-oriented magazines, that describe how to make a cartoony vampire faceon top of a cupcake. I rifled through them feeling unsatisfied. Then I found a picture of some cupcakes on a blog called horror gourmet that really struck a chord with me and I decided to make a cupcake that not only looked like it had been bitten into by a vampire, but that would bleed when you bit into it.

I baked my cupcakes, used the cupcake-filling technique I used on my devil’s food cupcakes to fill the cakes up with pureed cherry pie filling (canned or homemade) and topped them off with white icing to best accentuate the red bite marks. I made the marks using a skewer dipped in leftover cherry filling, making sure to leave a clear impression of a fang bite, rather than just a red streak on top of the cake.

The result was even better than I could have hoped for. They looked fantastic and tasted even better. The cherry filling worked surprisingly well in the vanilla cupcake and didn’t get absorbed by the cake at all, so it stayed nice a runny even after two days (how long the batch lasted before being devoured). The recipe makes 18 cupcakes, but you will probably have leftover filling and frosting, especially if you opt for canned cherry pie filling, so feel free to bake up a second batch to use everything up.

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I’ve mentioned before that I’m a fan of the Pimp That Snack website, where people submit their supersized versions of conventionally smaller snack foods, so when a good friend of mine asked me if I could rework my Devil’s Food Cupcakes with Vanilla Cream Filling into a giant Hostess cupcake lookalike, I didn’t hesitate before agreeing to give it a shot.

The result is the cake you see above, a 5-inch high by 9-inch in diameter tribute to a childhood favorite. It is made up of the equivalent of about three-dozen cupcakes, in terms of the amount of cake batter used, and has as much filling inside as two dozen “normal” cupcakes  (as you can imagine, we sliced it up to serve it). In spite of its impressive size, the cake is easy to make. I’ll run through the process I used here and give the recipes down at the bottom of this post so that you can try it yourself.

The first decision I needed to make was to determine what type of pan to use. A tube pan seemed like a possibility, since any cake baked in one will have a ready-made hole in the middle, but I decided that I wanted the cake to be moist and rich, heavier than a sponge or chiffon cake. I opted to make a layer cake and hollow out the center layers to create a cavity for the filling.

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