Archive for the ‘Cakes – Frosting’ Category
You know you’re on the right track with a cake recipe when the kitchen smells fantastic while your cake is in the oven. In fairness, not everything that smells great will turn out perfectly, but I tend to think that it increases the odds. This pumpkin cake is one that will fill your kitchen up with the fantastic scents of cinnamon, ginger, cloves and nutmeg while baking. It’ll put you into a fall holiday spirit, inspire you to bake more and – of course – make you very hungry for that first slice of cake.
The cake is extremely moist and tender, with a fluffy crumb that melts away on your tongue and only leaves pumpkin and spice behind. Most of the spice comes from my homemade pumpkin pie spice mixture, although there is vanilla and a generous splash of brandy in the cake. I think that sweet and spicy brandy (bourbon is a good substitute) works well with with the pumpkin in both the cake and the frosting, although you get a much more generous dose of the brandy in the frosting than you do in the cake!
Like many other recipes that use a small amount of alcohol for flavoring, you’re not going to get much alcohol in the finished product. I can guarantee that no one is going to get drunk on this even if they eat the entire cake (I suspect that you might get sick if you try, though). That said, if you prefer to leave out the brandy because you intend to serve the cake to kids, you can substitute water or orange juice. Alternatively, you might just opt to take the brandy out of the frosting, where its flavor is much more distinct, and simply add milk and vanilla extract to the buttercream that tops the cake.
Any way you slice it – and hopefully you’re slicing this in large pieces – this is a delicious fall cake that is perfect for serving a crowd. As a sheet cake, it’s not too fussy to make or to serve, and it is very easy to enjoy. The cake will stay moist for several days when well wrapped, too.
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When you have a serious chocolate craving, not just any chocolate cupcake is going to fit the bill. A batch of these Dark Chocolate Cupcakes is what you need when that kind of craving strikes. These cupcakes remind me of brownies, with their intense dark chocolate flavor. They also develop a slightly crackly top during baking, like brownies. Unlike brownies, the cupcakes are not dense and fudgy. They have a very tight and tender crumb that almost seems to melt in your mouth when you take a bite.
This is definitely a go-to recipe when I’m looking for a really rich chocolate cupcake. The flavor comes from a generous amount of dark chocolate that has been melted into the batter. I typically use a dark chocolate that is around 70 or 72% cacao, but the recipe will still work with a slightly more or less dark chocolate. You’ll get a lot of chocolate flavor in the cupcakes, so be sure to use a good quality chocolate in this recipe.
These cupcakes are very versatile and can be topped off with any kind of frosting you like. Instead of sticking with chocolate or vanilla, I opted for a more fall-flavored pumpkin frosting here. Pumpkin puree by itself doesn’t necessarily have that strong of a pumpkin flavor (not strong enough that a small amount will be enough for a whole batch of frosting), so simply adding pumpkin puree to a buttercream wasn’t going to produce the flavor that I was looking for. Pumpkin puree can be a bit coarse, as well, and needs to be processed very finely or pushed through a sieve to get a silky texture. Pumpkin butter – a very smooth, sweet and intensely flavored pumpkin preserve – was the answer to my flavoring problem. A small amount of pumpkin butter packs a lot of pumpkin flavor and was the perfect way to introduce a pumpkin element to an otherwise vanilla frosting. Pumpkin butter is available at many stores around Halloween and Thanksgiving, and you can always make your own. If you can’t find it, you can use pumpkin puree that has been strained, but you will also want to add a bit of extra spice to your frosting for extra fall flavor.
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Carrot cakes have a very comforting feel to them, with their warm spices and the rich cream cheese frostings that top them off. But there is no reason that a homey carrot cake can’t be dressed up a little bit by changing the presentation around and keeping the classic flavors that make it so delicious. This is a Carrot Cake Roulade is a jelly roll style carrot cake that is stuffed with a Cinnamon Cream Cheese Filling.
The base for the roulade is a sponge cake that is spiced with cinnamon, ginger and cloves and packed with plenty of shredded carrots. More traditional carrot cakes tend to be very moist and heavy, but this one is light and fluffy. The sponge cake is made by beating whole eggs until they have tripled in volume. It’s important to use room temperature eggs to get the best results. The sponge is the perfect base for a rolled cake because it holds its shape easily, and is also durable enough to be unrolled to allow the filling to be spread inside the cake before it is rolled back up again. I’ve used orange and lemon zest to give the filling a little extra depth in the past. This time around, I played up the spicy notes of the carrot cake by adding some ground cinnamon to the cream cheese filling.
In this dessert, the sponge cake is soft and the filling is rich and creamy. To add a little bit of texture to it, I sometimes add in a generous handful of finely chopped walnuts or pecans to the cake batter before it bakes. Large nuts can make the cake difficult to roll and to slice. Finely chopped nuts are much easier to work with and still add a little bit of crunch to the finished cake. I usually just dust my roulade with confectioners’ sugar before serving, but a few whole nuts make for a nice garnish, as well.
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As much as I enjoy a good layer cake, most of them don’t have a lot going on texture-wise. Tender, fluffy layers of cake are sandwiched with creamy frosting. It is a wonderful contrast no matter what flavor cake you’re enjoying – no doubt about that! – but sometimes it is nice to have some nuts, chocolate chips or other elements to add some texture and a little extra flavor.
This Chocolate Chip Layer Cake with Chocolate Chip Buttercream has chocolate chips in the cake batter and in the buttercream frosting. Regular or miniature chocolate chips will both work well for the cake, adding bursts of chocolate throughout. Miniature chocolate chips are light enough to be stirred into the batter, while I tend to add regular chocolate chips before baking so the don’t all sink down into the batter. They do add a subtle crunch to the cake (since you can’t frost the cake while it’s still warm from the oven and it must be cooled completely), but you can let them melt on your tongue as you enjoy a slice if you want to maximize the chocolate chip experience.
The cake is light and moist, with a very good chocolate flavor. There is some coffee in the recipe, but it can actually be substituted with water if you aren’t a big fan and would prefer not to use the coffee. It simply enhances the chocolate flavor in this cake and doesn’t make a big impact on the flavor in its own. Overall, this is a great all purpose chocolate cake even without the chocolate chips, and this is a recipe that I like to use for other projects, as well.
The frosting is a simple buttercream that I enriched with a little bit of sour cream and flavored with cocoa powder and a bit of vanilla. It has a clear chocolate flavor, but it is much lighter than the cake layers beneath it. The sour cream makes the frosting extra creamy and adds a bit of a tang that makes the frosting seem lighter and slightly less sweet. Instead of stirring chocolate chips into the frosting (which would have made it a little too lumpy to easily spread on the cake), I finely chopped up some chocolate and stirred it in. This gave my frosting some pleasant texture, as well as some extra chocolate, but didn’t take away from the overall creaminess of it.
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Carrot cake is a crowd-pleasing dessert. Although I admit that chocolate and vanilla will probably always have a slightly bigger fan base than carrot cake does, there is just something about a moist and spicy cake carrot cake that makes it a big hit every time I serve one. Carrot cake will probably win itself even more fans when it shows up in cupcake form.
This Carrot Cake Cupcake recipe is one of my favorite. The batter is very easy to make and the finished cupcakes have a beautiful crumb and a light texture – none of that dense, oily feel that you can get in a bad carrot cake. I used a combination of cinnamon, allspice and nutmeg in these cupcakes and they have a mild spice flavor to them. The small amount of orange juice in the batter compliments the brown sugar and the rest of the spices, but doesn’t add a strong orange flavor to the cake. If you prefer your cupcakes to be spicier, you can double the spices or mix things up by adding some ground ginger or ground cloves into the batter.
I topped my cupcakes with cream cheese frosting and decorated them with little green and orange carrots. I often finish off carrot cakes this way because mini carrots are very easy to make and it takes very little frosting to make them, so I can still be generous when frosting the rest of my cupcakes! These cupcakes will keep well when stored in an airtight container for a couple of days, but I should warn you that once those little carrots are piped on top, they become a lot more difficult to resist and they might not last too long. I know they don’t in my kitchen!
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