However, Cait was pondering cupcakes, and showed me a recipe for Thai Ice Tea Cupcakes, and hey, I HAD ALL THOSE INGREDIENTS IN MY HOUSE minus the cream cheese for the frosting, but I was at the point where I’d be willing to go out and get that later. 

Yesterday consisted of lessons about chard. Today I learned about cooking with egg whites! I r total baking/cooking noob, so I’d never separated eggs before. Beating egg whites to “soft peaks” also presented itself as a new experience. Basically, beat them eggs until they’re all delightfully foamy!

Then … I had to fold them into the batter. What even??

Luckily, I had Sophie on the intarwebs to hold my hand through all this. She also sent me this video, which features a delightfully congenial and not-cheesy guide to all of the above. Folding the eggs properly is especially key for leavening (or “sproinging” as Sophie said) the cupcakes. Like bread!

I don’t think I folded the egg whites totally evenly, but it was still so satisfying to see some of them just poppin’ up! Like daisies! And look how adorably round some of them are!

In the end, they taste very quirkily delicious. I mean, they didn’t taste like thai ice tea, and it’s hard to describe beyond “nom-worthy”. The frostings were pretty badass, though. WARNING: I’d say you only need a fourth of what the frosting recipe calls for, as I now have a huge bag of thai ice tea cream cheese frosting leftover. It’s definitely more than enough for 24 cupcakes. Then again, my cupcakes don’t look nearly as voluminous and pretty as the original post’s pictures. HMM.

And yeah, I made some thai ice tea to eat with my cupcake. It’s made with a mix my parents get from GrandMart. My mom throws little jasmine tea leaves in, and they add a lovely twist to the drink!

I am at Karen and Spanky’s house.  There are Street Fighter 4 sounds and egg beater sounds in the background.  We have had a Tea Party, limited in size but not limited in scope.  We don’t have pictures of our full spread, because food pretty much disappeared when it hit the table.  Also, the table was not large enough for all the food we made.  Also, our designated food photographer was too busy stuffing her face full of food (and thus taking care of our table space problem) to document all of our spread.

Drinks:

- Earl Grey Creme tea (from Teavana)

- Homemade ginger beer

- Storebought ginger beer

- I had a muthafuckin’ Vault. But that was just for maximum cooking power

Food:

- Cucumber, cream cheese, and whole wheat mini sandwiches

- Rosemary ham, cream cheese, and whole wheat mini sandwiches

- Bacon-wrapped stuffed jalapenos

- Cranberry scones

- Bacon and cheddar scones (see recipe below)

- Mumsy’s  buttermilk cake

- Vanilla cupcakes with strawberry whipped cream

- Clotted cream and blackberry jam from jars

The Baconator

The sandwiches ended up leaving us prematurely, and Gloria ate all of the cucumber, so I could not make more. The rosemary ham is delicious–I found it at my local Harris Teeter, so you might find some where you are too.  The bacon-wrapped jalapeno thingies were from a recipe I got from The Pioneer Woman, who has uncontrollably good taste in food.  Even people who couldn’t take the heat did not in fact have to get out of the kitchen.  Gloria’s bacon and cheddar scones rounded up the savory foods. We remarked later that they tasted a lot like the Asian pancakes Yulin posted about.  They would probably taste like a complete breakfast with a side of scrambled eggs.

Oh god... cupcakes...

I could comment on the cranberry scones and clotted cream and the buttermilk cake, but I couldn’t do them justice.  Not when my heart belongs to the queen of all desserts, the vanilla cupcakes.  Although I love cupcakes, I have never eaten one and been utterly consumed with the urgent need to eat another.  These cupcakes were like watching a hot chick happen to drop a quarter in front of you.  You watch her bend over, and all you want to do is throw another quarter out there, so it can keep bending over. And you know, because of the delicious whipped cream, that she will still be moist and not overpoweringly sweet and perfectly flavored and covered in strawberries again and again and again………..

Shit.

The point: I could eat a lot.  Karen has promised that she will post her exact demon recipe, to capture the hearts of men by singing them into the sea.

Quote from the room: “Oh god, he’s got a purple thong on. Oh shit.”

I think I have to go.

And here are some unrelated cupcakes that are just really darn pretty.

Because of this, nothing in baking confounds me more than red velvet cake.  The red does not contribute to the taste at all (the smooth depth of the cake comes from cocoa powder countered with vinegar and a little more salt than usual). There is no Vulcan logic reason why red is more successful a velvet than any other color. Yet, according to totally objective experiments with color, red has some kind of arcane magic that truly makes it the king of velvet-based cakes.

I used a recipe which had previously yielded 24 cupcakes, and divided it evenly into thirds. I made each third identical, save for the dye color. Red yielded the predicted 8 cupcakes. Green was reduced to 6. And blue had a measly 4 cupcakes. What the hell, blue. Pictorial evidence will show that the blue cupcakes even look denser. They formed a kind of smooth crust, even though the entire cupcake top would squish a little on command.

I call for red to yield its dark secrets to the rest of the baking world. I want my deep, rich crayon colors to be equally delicious across all desserts.

Karen made “Better Than Sex” cupcakes with two different icings, and Jo had her cupcake decorating contest!

See the whole set here!

1. Apparently, muffin papers are a “seasonal” product at your local K-Mart. That season is “about two weeks before Valentine’s day, but not one,” in case you were wondering.

2. But if you grease and flour a nonstick pan this works fine, too. I think it may have made the cupcakes dry out a bit faster, but if yours are all getting eaten in one fell swoop this shouldn’t be a problem.

3. As the recipe will tell you, the glaze does not taste very champagne-y once it cools. I splashed in a bit more champagne than the recommended 1/4 cup – because let’s face it, you bought a whole (or half, whatevs) bottle of champagne for this thing; you have some leftover.

4. The recipe doesn’t note this but it’s good to glaze the half-strawberries for the top separately, dipping them in by the green bit or a toothpick, if you are me and cut off the leaves because they were getting wilted. Makes them stick better and makes them look prettier; everyone wins.

5. My glaze, alas, did not come out as pretty as Karen’s – I have a feeling this may be because I ran out of sugar. Terrible, right? Also out of my neighbor’s sugar. So I substituted some powdered sugar – I think this did not turn as clear when simmered, and thus the cupcakes looked sort of frosted with delicious rather than encased in clear, shiny delicious. Not as pretty! Thought it may also just be that I’m an idiot when it comes to anything like candy-making – if there is boiling sugar involved, I should probably be elsewhere.

6. These taste like approximately the most delicious thing in the world if you eat them while drinking the aforementioned the leftover champagne.

That’s it! These get an amazing reception, also, because they are just so pretty. They’re one of those foods that magically look like a whole lot more work than they are.

Until then, enjoy these pictures of cupcake adventures from a month ago! These are from a Cupcake Project recipe Karen found for strawberry cupcakes with a champagne glaze.

See the dyed red icing? That's just normal icing with red food coloring!

Full disclosure: I got this recipe from a Nigella Lawson book. She’s prettier than Giada de Laurentiis and uses more butter than Paula Dean. Caveat eator: this cupcake is not for the clogged of heart.

Cupcakes:
1/2 cup soft unsalted butter
4 ounces bittersweet chocolate (Ghirardelli’s baking chocolate)
1 1/4 cups black cherry preserves (I used a kind with no cane sugar added)
1/2 cup sugar
pinch of salt
2 large eggs, beaten
1 cup self-rising cake flour*
12 maraschino cherries

Icing:
4 ounces bittersweet chocolate (see above)
1 cup heavy cream
Splash of kirsch or kirschwasser, whatever your alcohol controller lets you have

* Don’t be a dbag and buy self-rising cake flour. Sift together 1 1/2 tsp of baking powder (See the word powder? It’s not baking soda.) and 1/2 tsp salt for every one cup of flour. Hey, that’s how much flour this recipe calls for!

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

Put your butter in the pan at medium low. Once it’s almost all melty, melt the chocolate in that. I used a nonstick pan, by the way. Okay, is all your shit mostly melted? Take it off the burner, and stir it around gentle-like until it’s a smooth, happy butter chocolate mixture. For maximum visceral pleasure, use a silicone spoon in your nonstick pan. It’s really like calling out to God, and having him pat you on the cheek and telling you you have nice skin. Now toss in your cherry preserve, sugar, salt, and eggs. Stir until it LOVES you.

When everything is looking pretty mixed together, pour it over the flour and mix it all together. Depending on your preserves, the stuff is pretty chunky, so be really diligent in making sure you don’t have massive clumps of flour in your stuff.

You should have a sticky, chunky batter. It glops. Put that into cupcake cups, then pop it in the oven. Because the batter is so sticky, I used a #20 ice cream disher, just like Alton Brown tells me to, and it worked like a charm.

Bake for 25 minutes, and you should have exquisitely perfect looking cupcakes. You can stop here if you like, but only if you suck.

You can do this pretty much as soon as your fingers can take the heat. Take a pastry round. I used a 1″ round. Cut a hole in your cupcake, not straight to the bottom! You can dig out the hole, but I found that if I twisted the round a couple times, the whole cupcake center would pop right out. Pop a maraschino cherry into the hole, pull a little bit of cupcake off the bottom of your cupcake hole, then pop the cap back on. If you’re willing to substitute cleanliness for deliciousness, pour a splash of the kirschvasser into the hole with your cherry.

Now the icing! You can get it thicker by using less whipping cream. The original recipe asks for 1/3 + 1 tsp cups of cream. But I wanted the tops of my cupcakes to look like chocolate candy, so I made my icing watery, poured it on, then waited for it to set. It’s a tough icing to make, though. Here we go. Put your stove on medium low. Use a heavy-bottomed pot that you can whisk in. Put the chocolate in the the pot. Put the heavy cream in the pot. Put a splash of kirschvasser into the pot. Bring it all to a boil. Once it’s bubbly, take the pot off of the heat, then whisk the shit out of it. It should be smooth and pretty when you’re done.

While it’s liquidy, smooth the concoction over your cupcakes, which surely have totally cooled by now. Seriously. You didn’t just ice a warm cupcake, did you?

For the cool red marks, drip some red food coloring into your icing. Mix. Then drip it down in awesome patterns onto your cupcake.

Conclusions: Everyone likes the cupcake. According to Frazier, it is delicious but messy. According to Gloria, you cannot drink a very hopsy beer after eating it. If I had one wish, I would wish that Whole Foods carried morello cherries, which are cherries essentially pickled in liquor. Alas, the Clarendon Whole Foods has failed me. Good thing I have all of this hopsy beer to console me in these dark days.