Mini Cupcakes with Raspberry Cream Cheese Frosting

Valentine's Day is right around the corner. I have to tell you, I do love Valentine's Day. I'm not a big fan of the jewelry commercial-single red rose-carriage ride in the park type of Valentine's Day, though. I just sort of wish that we could all cover shoe boxes in white paper and decorate our "mailboxes" for a Valentine's party like we did in elementary school (well, that's what I remember doing). When I was little, BaBa would send all of her great-grandchildren a Valentine's card with a two-dollar bill inside. Isn't that cute? I still have a stack of $2 bills inside of a shoe box with her Valentine's cards somewhere in Texas. We would always have a festive breakfast on Valentine's Day, I would always wear a festive outfit, and all-in-all I love what I think of as "pink and red hearts day." My love of Valentine's Day has never been dependent on the presence of a "significant other" in my life; and, thank goodness for that, because Dudley says that Valentine's Day trivializes love. He says:  "Valentine's Day is commercial extortion and emotional piracy." To that end, we don't really celebrate Valentine's Day. Well, I celebrate it, and because he loves me, he attempts to celebrate Valentine's Day. For Dudley, this means buying the most clichéd gifts you can think of. For example, last year he gave me a Harlequin romance novel and a giant, red "velvet" box of chocolates. Last year I had the flu over Valentine's Day, and ironically enough, I think that Dudley ate most of those chocolates!

 

No matter how you feel about Valentine's Day, though, it's hard to hate a sweet little cupcake, right? I just love these cupcakes because they're pink and red, and in a landscape full of snow, they make me smile. The cupcake is Martha Stewart's yellow buttermilk cupcake recipe. I've had great luck with this recipe, though it makes a huge batch of cupcakes so I usually make 1/2, 1/3, or 1/4 of a recipe. The frosting is a raspberry cream cheese frosting. In my opinion, the yellow buttermilk cupcakes are a great base for a stronger flavor, like chocolate, or in this case, raspberry. Now that I think about it, this would be a fun cupcake to top with a swirl of chocolate and a nice raspberry on top, too. I'll have to remember that for next time! In the meantime, Happy Valentine's Day to you! And, I'm curious? How do you feel about all of the romance in the air on February 14th? 

Raspberry Cream Cheese Frosting

adapted from this recipe by Martha Stewart 

yields enough frosting to generously frost about 36 mini cupcakes 

Ingredients: 

2 sticks unsalted butter

16 oz (1 pound) cream cheese 

1/2 cup of raspberry coulis or seedless raspberry jam

3-4 cups of powdered sugar (you'll need to adjust for your own sweetness preference and consistency)

Directions:
Place butter and cream cheese in the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment. Beat on medium-high until fluffy. Add the raspberry coulis or preserves and beat until combined. Reduce speed; add confectioners' sugar and vanilla, beat until well combined.

*Raspberry Coulis

Ingredients:
2 cups fresh or frozen raspberries
About 1/2 cup of sugar
About 1 tablespoon of lemon juice

Directions:
1. In a medium saucepan over medium-high heat, bring raspberries and 1/2 cup sugar to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer, stirring occasionally, until mixture starts to thicken, about 15 minutes.
2. Press mixture through a fine-mesh strainer, using a spatula to extract as much liquid as possible. Discard seeds and skins. Stir in 1 tbsp. lemon juice. Taste and add more sugar or lemon juice if you like. Serve coulis warm or at room temperature.


*NOTE:  I made the coulis because I had frozen raspberries in the freezer and I think it gives the frosting a more true and intense raspberry flavor. I cooked my raspberries for about 30 minutes (but I have an ancient electric range, if you're cooking with gas your time will change) to the texture of jam. You don't want this coulis to have too much liquid in it because it water down your finished cream cheese frosting.

Muffin Mondays: Cranberry Vanilla Muffins

I'm a big believer in breakfast, lunch, and dinner (I won't even mention dessert, but that's another meal I believe in). Dinner isn't usually an issue, there are so many recipes to try that it's likely I'll never get through all of them. Breakfast is a different story. I'm a pretty picky breakfast eater. I don't like eggs for breakfast, nor pancakes, waffles and such. I generally like my breakfast to consist of some cross of carb and coffee. Once the weather turns the slightest bit cool, I move from cereal and smoothies to oatmeal with Greek yogurt and fruit. The trouble is, I eat that breakfast daily starting in October, and by the middle of January, when it's really cold, I'm sick and tired of it. I ate toast with butter and jam for a bit, and then I started in on the muffins. I'm a huge fan of muffins for breakfast because they're something that I can make on Saturday mornings and enjoy all week long. They're portable, there are infinite possibilities for muffin creations, and they're lovely with your (my) morning cup o' joe (or even tea or OJ). I've been on such a muffin kick that I decided it'd be fun to post them here on the Singleton. And, because I'm a suck for alliteration, I decided that it's only fitting that muffins be posted on Mondays.

 

The recipe for these muffins comes from a cookbook called Cold Weather Cooking by Sarah Leah Chase. I don't know how I found out about this cookbook, but I know that I purchased it used off of Amazon for about $1 right after I moved to DC. I've looked at the book quite a bit, but this was my first time using a recipe out of it. I don't know what's going on around the country or the world, but in DC we're digging out from a serious snowfall, and the title of this book seemed very apt for my weekend muffins.

These flavor base for this recipe is a vanilla sugar made by processing 1 cup of sugar with 1/2 of a vanilla bean. I almost skipped the vanilla bean because it seems like a pretty pricey ingredient for my morning breakfast, but then I decided to go ahead with it. The vanilla sugar was fabulous, but I do think I'll try this again with vanilla extract in place of the vanilla bean. The only change I made to the recipe was to replace half of the butter with an equal amount of Greek yogurt. I do this almost every time I make muffins, and I've never had a bad result. I used 1% milk in place of the whole milk and I think that there wasn't a noticeable difference. The real reason I decided to make these muffins is because the recipe calls for fresh cranberries. I love fresh cranberries in baked goods, and any time I see them on the ingredient list it amps up my interest in a recipe. 

 

The verdict on these muffins? They are absolutely delightful. I just loved every single aspect of these little goodies, from the light fluffy texture to the contrast of the sweet batter and the tart bits of fresh cranberry. The topping is a nutmeg sugar topping and I had my doubts about adding nutmeg to this flavor combination but it works. Of all the baking spices, nutmeg is really far down on my list, but I liked the way the flavor of the nutmeg enhanced these muffins. They're red and white and a perfect addition to any Valentine's breakfast or brunch.

Cranberry-Vanilla Muffins

Cold Weather Cooking by Sarah Leah Chase

Ingredients

Batter:

1/2 vanilla bean, cut into small pieces

1 cup sugar

1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter (I used 4 tbsp unsalted butter and 4 tbsp nonfat Greek yogurt)

2 large eggs

2 cups unbleached, all purpuse flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/2 cup milk

2 1/2 cups fresh cranberries, coarsely chopped

Topping

2 tablespoons sugar

1/2 teaspoon grated nutmeg

1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Line 12-14 muffin cups with paper liners.

2. Prepare the batter:  Place the vanilla bean and sugar in a blender or food processor and process until the vanilla bean is ground into tiny flecks.

3. Using an electric mixer, cream the vanilla sugar with the butter in a mixing bowl until smooth. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition.

4. Mix together the flour, baking powder, and salt. Add the dry ingredients to the creamed mixture alternately with the milk, mixing until smooth and fluffy. Fold in the cranberries. 

5. Divide the batter between the muffin cups, filling each one almost full. Mix together the sugar and the nutmeg for the topping and sprinkle generously over the muffins. Bake until puffed, light golden brown, and a toothpick inserted in the center of a muffin comes out clean, about 25 minutes. Serve the muffins warm or at room temperature. 

Makes 12-14 muffins (I got 12 muffins from my batch).

For a printable version of this recipe, click here.

TWD: Milk Chocolate Mini Cakes

Happy Groundhog Day! It's snowing outside of my window as I'm writing this post, and this morning Punxsutawny Phil saw his shadow. You know what that means, right? My thin-blooded Texan self is in for another 6 weeks of winter. I want warmer weather so badly I feel sort of like a junkie right now. I need some serious heat and sunshine in my life. In the meantime, I think that the heat around here is going to come from my oven because one thing that cold weather is good for is baking!

Baking is always fun, but it's great in the winter when the house is already cold and you don't have to worry about excessive kitchen heat. To help direct my baking fix, this week's TWD is milk chocolate mini bundt cakes. Now, I have a lot of kitchen gear devoted to minis because when you're a singleton, mini is often the name of the game. I do not, however, have mini bunt pans so I made mine in muffin tins. I thought that the cake batter was reasonably easy to mix together, but I did notice that it was very, very stiff and heavy (I'll attribute that to the 7 oz of melted milk chocolate in the batter). I left out the swirl because it just didn't appeal to me, and I added mini chocolate chips instead. I got 10 muffin size cakes out of this recipe, but I could easily have gotten 11 or 12 -- my cakes rose very high and nearly overflowed! These little cakes were delicate, and about 3 of them broke as I flipped them out. I was kind of concerned about making this recipe in muffin tins simply because it doesn't have the hole in the center and I wasn't sure how that would work out as far as cooking all the way through. I did have to bake my cakes about 10 minutes longer, but other than that the transition was seriously easy. 

Now, let's talk about the glaze. Or should I say chocolate tar? This was some serious tar -- I accidentally got some on my pants and I really feel like I need a can of WD-40 to get it out. I used high quality bittersweet chocolate. It was melted and smooth and I added the corn syrup and, so far, so good. And then, it just got really thick. It didn't exactly seize, but boy howdy, it was so thick. Thick like taffy, so thick that I really had to manipulate my "glaze" to even attempt to have it artfully drip down the sides of my cake. Thick like tar, really. 

 

These are some seriously tasty cakes, even with the chocolate tar on top. I tried to ask Dudley what he thought of the cakes while he was eating one, and I could just tell that the glaze was really impeding his ability to chew, let alone speak. The glaze just sort of stuck to everything in your mouth and it was really difficult to consume. I ended up eating around the glaze, but Dudley seemed to enjoy the whole kit-n-kaboodle. I absolutely loved the cake part -- it was chocolatey and moist and delicious. The milk chocolate that I used is Endangered Species and it has a 52% cocoa content, which I think might be part of the reason that I could really taste the chocolate. Thank you, Kristin, for choosing this recipe! I will definitely make the cakes again. As for the glaze, I'm sure it was user error, but I think next time I might just leave them plain or try ganache. If you'd like the recipe, you can check pgs 188-189 of the book or visit Kristin's blog, I'm Right About Everything.