When Life hands you Cake Crumbs......

8/20/09
Red Velvet Cupcake. A second attempt.
I had to try this one more time. Got hooked on this little strange reddish-brown cupcake for whatever reason I can't explain. This time, I was torn between trying Martha's recipe featured in Cupcakes or go with the infamous New York Magnolia Bakery recipe. Toss of the coin. Magnolia won. And I lost...
big time! Don't get me wrong, the cupcakes were delicious but there's just something about the texture: it wasn't moist, was spongy (which is not the texture I was going for), slightly on the dry side....decadent is just not the word that comes to mind after a first bite. I wanted the scrumptious red velvet cupcakes I've tasted at the high-end cake stores: rich chocolaty taste, moist and crumbly texture with melt-in-your mouth cream cheese frosting that's to die for! But the 36+ cupcakes that came out of my oven today was far from that. What happened? Over-mixing? Measuring glitch? Uneven or hot spots in the oven? Over-baking? Weather's too hot? All of the above? What made it worse was the recipe wasn't exactly halvable....c'mon how do you half 3 eggs?? So I ended up with red velvet cupcakes....all 40 of them! What am I going to do with that many not-exactly-red-velvet cupcakes?
Here's what I did with them:




Crumbed 'em cupcakes up in my Cuisinart Food Processor and mixed with rich, dark chocolate melted in cream, then shaped into lollipop-size balls, refrigerate for ~1 hour and them dipped in chocolate ganache. Ta-da!! Now that's how you take crumbs and turn them into simply delightful lollicakes! Yumm!

There're life lessons to be learnt here.

Speaking of which, we just got the results from D's stress test (GSPECT). Suffice to say it didn't make my day but we're continuing to be strong in our Faith.

Life throws you curveballs sometimes.

Well, at least you know what to do with the cake crumbs..........