More Adventures with Ice Cream and Cupcakes...

This Sunday my mom announced she wanted some sort of dessert to go with our lovely turkey dinner Dad roasted.  I listed several options--a cake, pie, torte, cookies...but we finally decided on ice cream. 

I chose the Hazelnut and Chocolate Chunk ice cream option from the Fine Cooking magazine.  It's hard to believe the last time I made ice cream was over a month ago!  Check it out here.  Very easy, except I think the hardest part was waiting for the ice cream to finish churning! 

Also a couple of side-notes.  I used a 4-oz. bar of Girardelli chocolate.  The family thought this was too much (I don't understand how you can ever have too much chocolate, though!), so next time I'll only use about half as much.  This recipe also calls to infuse the milk/cream/sugar mixture with the nuts.  I did this, and afterwards I saved the hazelnuts.  I plan on making oatmeal within the next day or two and stirring in some of the nuts--I mean, you can't go wrong with hazelnuts cooked in sugar and cream!  haha  Next time I make this recipe, I'll probably leave some of the nuts in the mixture simply because everyone agreed it would have been even better with some extra crunch.

Finally, I have 5 egg white sitting in the fridge, since the ice cream recipe only uses yolks.  Any ideas what to do with them?

And no pictures, due to the fact the entire batch of ice cream was eaten immediately following dinner.

Now on to the cupcakes.  My friend came over last Saturday and we made dessert for the family dinner.  We chose bright, cheerful colors because it was pouring down rain/extremely windy/chance of tornados.  Very depressing weather.  Anyway. 

Our sunflower cupcakes.  :)

We used Abigail Johnson Dodge's chocolate cupcake recipe and made a simple buttercream recipe for the frosting.



All 12 cupcakes.



Coconut and Chocolate Cupcakes

Yep.  I'm back to cupcakes--for the moment anyway.  I used Abigail Johnson Dodge's Emergency Blender Cupcakes from her cookbook, The Weekend Baker (New York: 2005).  If you remember, I also made these earlier this month here.  This time, however, I tried a different flavoring and the frosting was once again successful.  :)

I made these into mini cupcakes, and instead of 12 regular sized cupcakes the recipe made about 42 minis.  I also chose to flavor the buttercream frosting with coconut.  I beat 1/4 butter (room temperature) with about 1 1/2 cups confectioner's sugar.  I then added about 2 tablespoons of coconut milk and beat that in.  Voila!  After topping the cakes with frosting, I sprinkled coconut flakes on top (sweetened of course). 

more dessert

Spiced cupcakes with cream cheese frosting.  Hungry yet?  I've made this scrumptious recipe from the Gourmet magazine two times now, and they're a huge hit. 

{Please ignore the Christmas/holiday cupcake wrappers...they were the only ones handy.}

This was a very easy recipe from the something-er-rather issue of the Gourmet magazine.  They remind me of my Molasses cookies, but a very tender cake version and with a lovely cream cheese frosting.  And this time I followed the recipe and didn't mess up the frosting!  yay!  The only thing about this recipe (which I'd noted from last time) was the original recipe didn't make nearly enough frosting to frost all 12 cupcakes.  So I made 1.5x which worked well. 

I also made Mocha Cupcakes (on a different day, of course) from the Wild about Cupcakes cookbook by Rachel Lane.  These were very yummy, too.  I didn't like that the cupcakes sank, though.  They're not supposed to be poufy cupcakes like the spiced cupcakes above, but I was still rather disappointed.  Also, the topping is a flavored whipped cream so instead of "frosting" them all I stashed the cream in the fridge to be dolloped on top when dessert was served. 

Cupcakes!

This past Thursday I made cupcakes with my little sister.  It seems I'm on a baking spree, but that's because sadly I don't have as much time to cook full meals.  But that's been remedied this weekend with posts to come. 

I've made several batches of cupcakes (especially last year when I went through a cupcake frenzy), but my favorite remains Abigail Johnson Dodge's Emergency Blender Cupcakes from her cookbook, The Weekend Baker (New York: 2005).  They're quick, easy, and--you guessed it--can be made in the blender. 

The recipe makes about a dozen regular sized cupcakes.  I only made 9, however, because I wanted to experiment with mini cupcakes which I hadn't done yet.  The leftover batter made about 6 of the minis and I found they bake very nicely for 9 minutes at 375 degrees.

I also skipped the chocolate fudgy frosting because my sister insised on traditional "sugary frosting...either pink or blue" and we didn't have any sweetened condensed milk on hand anyway.  So I attempted making butter cream frosting but I apparently looked in all the wrong cookbooks for a basic recipe.  I knew it had butter and confectioner's sugar, and maybe a little milk.  So I went with that and made it up as I went along.  The first problem, though, was I didn't add enough sugar.  Apparently a half stick of butter can hold a LOT of sugar!  Secondly, the frosting was lumpy.  Not cool.  So next time I'll try sifting the sugar.