The Very Hungry Caterpillar: A Literary Study in Cupcakes

I don't know about you, but I LOVE the idea of 1st birthday parties that follow a literary theme. What? I'm a book worm. So, I especially like a party that focuses on a book about a caterpillar who eats his way to a bellyache. Particularly when there is a giant caterpillar head smash cake for the birthday boy. Now, I'm not exactly an expert on children's birthday parties, but my friend went ALL OUT for this birthday. Fancy sign on the door. Cut out sausages, ice cream cones, lollipops, cake, pie, strawberries, oranges, and pears (complete with holes eaten through them) on the windows. A balloon caterpillar over the mantle. This was some serious dedication. Good thing I had an eye for detail on this cake, and included spiky little hairs on his back, six feet, and purple antennae.

If you don't know Eric Carle's masterpiece, get thee to a library, or to Amazon. Right. Now. This is children's literature brilliance we're talking. Colors! Counting! Metamorphosis! Messages about a balanced diet! Here's the little guy as pictured on the cover of the book:

And here's the Big Guy on my friend's kitchen table. He's about three feet long, and comes in chocolate or vanilla. I'm not totally thrilled with how thin and uneven the frosting is on the head, but the birthday boy's mom had a request about limiting sugar and frosting quantity. Something silly about not wanting red vomit tonight...go figure.

CAKE!

There are a couple of wonderful, crazy people in my life who are entrusting to me their wedding cakes. The first wedding, in August, is one of my nieces. The second wedding, in November, is one of my friends I've known since I was a kid. I decided to have both couples over last weekend for cake tasting! It was a bit of an undertaking, making seven cakes, but I've learned quite a lot already (parchment paper makes everything easier, cakes take longer to bake than I remember, white chocolate makes frosting very hard when chilled, champagne flavoring tastes more like bubble gum than bubbly, mango cake is a terrible, terrible idea). I had asked both brides to give me flavor ideas, and they both gave me general ideas, but nothing specific, so I ran with my own ideas.






Here are the flavors I ended up with:

• vanilla cake with raspberry butter cream
• mango cake with mango curd and white chocolate-key lime frosting (cake-FAIL, frosting-good)
  
• pumpkin cake with bourbon cream cheese frosting
• strawberry cake with vanilla champagne butter cream
• chocolate cake with dark chocolate ganache, chocolate mousse and white chocolate cream cheese frosting
• vanilla cake with raspberry filling and swiss meringue butter cream
• chocolate and vanilla cakes with chocolate ganache and vanilla butter cream

I can't think of much else to say, except that it was a huge amount of cake, and even after forcing cake off on both couples to take home, my coworkers still enjoyed the remains all week long. I haven't been informed of final decisions by the brides and grooms just yet, but I think the over all favorite was the pumpkin cake.

Pumpkin Whoopie Pies with Maple-Bourbon Cream Cheese Filling

Oh, fall. How I love you, with your abundance of squash. We picked up a couple pie pumpkins last weekend (along with acorn and butternut squashes) at Hurley Farms in Indian Lake. This one pumpkin produced some pumpkin risotto, a half dozen whoopie pies, and a 3" pumpkin cheesecake for the two of us. The pumpkin whoopie pies were for a friend's birthday--a friend who has a love for pumpkin as deep as I do. The recipe was an adapted recipe from How to Eat a Cupcake. She halved the recipe when she made it; I quartered it. I also made the frosting extra-special for my friend; instead of a standard cream cheese frosting, I made a maple-bourbon cream cheese frosting, which appeals to pretty much his entire flavor palate (and mine--the frosting was SO good)

The proportions are mine, with the original proportions in parenthesis.

Pumpkin Whoopie Pies
Makes 14 cookies (7 pies if you can stand to wait until they are cool to taste that pumpkiny goodness)

5/8 cup all-purpose flour (2 3/4 cups)
1/2 teaspoon baking powder (2 tsp)
1/4 teaspoon baking soda (1 tsp)
1 teaspoons ground cinnamon (4 1/2 tsp)
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg (1 1/2 tsp)
1/4 teaspoon ground ginger (1 1/2 tsp)
1/8 teaspoon ground cloves (1/2 tsp)
1/2 stick (4 tablespoons) unsalted butter, at room temp (2 1/2 sticks)
1/4 cup sugar (1 1/2 cups)
1/2 tablespoon molasses (3 Tbsp)
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract (2 tsp)
1 large eggs (4)
1/3 cup pumpkin puree (not pumpkin pie filling) (1 1/4 cups)
1 oz buttermilk (1/2 cup)

Preheat oven to 325 degrees F. Whisk dry ingredients (except sugar) together in a medium bowl.
Using electric mixer, beat butter, sugar, molasses and vanilla in large bowl to blend. Add eggs 1 at a time, beating until blended after each addition. Add pumpkin puree.
Mix in dry ingredients in 3 additions alternately with buttermilk in 2 additions, beating until just combined.
Line large baking sheets with parchment paper. Drop dough by rounded tablespoonfuls (I used a number 24 ice cream scoop) onto prepared sheets, spacing 2 inches apart, leaving enough room for dough to spread.

Bake for 10-15 minutes, until cake springs back when lightly pressed in the center. Cool completely on wire racks before filling.

Maple-Bourbon Cream Cheese Frosting (my own recipe)
3 oz. cream cheese, softened
1 tablespoon unsalted butter, softened
1-2 cups confectioners' sugar, sifted, plus more if needed
a bit of vanilla extract
a bit of maple extract
a good glug of bourbon (I used Woodford Reserve)

Blend cream cheese and butter until smooth and well combined. Add in 1 cup sugar and flavorings. Blend until combined. Add additional powdered sugar, a little at a time, until frosting becomes stiff enough to not run off the cookies. Taste for flavor, and adjust if necessary.

Spoon a good amount of frosting on half of the pies (or pipe on with a pastry bag), an squish a second pie on top. Place in the fridge for a while to let the frosting firm up some more. Then enjoy. Mmm.

Caramel Apple Cheesecake

Mmm...fall. There are a number of things about fall I look forward to, including the ever changing colors of the leaves, pumpkin beers, Halloween, and apple desserts. My CSA has been keeping us in apples and pears for the last several weeks--so many that we can hardly keep up. In celebration of my dad's and brother-in-law's October birthdays, I made a caramel apple cheesecake. The singular inspiration being all the apples in my house, and the desire to make something other than apple pie. I couldn't find a recipe that was exactly what I wanted; Not Quite Nigella's came closest in terms what I was visualizing, but fell short of my exact expectations (I used my own cheesecake recipe, made it less sweet, I wanted more apples...). Like most dabbling food bloggers out there, I simply used the recipe as a jumping off point, and embellished. Here's the recipe, as I butchered it:

Crust:
Several large handfuls of vanilla wafers (I used the fun color minis, but I'm sure that's irrelevant)

6 tablespoons butter

Blend in food processor until it come together. Press into bottom of springform pan, and bake for 10 minutes or so until it's kinda firm and not going to float away when you add filling.

Apple Layer:

2 tablespoons butter

3 large apples, peeled, cored and sliced thinly (I used three different varieties)

3 tablespoons brown sugar

glug maple syrup

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

a touch of powdered ginger

a touch of all spice

a touch of freshly grated nutmeg

1/2 tsp cornstarch

Saute apples with butter, brown sugar, and maple syrup until there is liquid from the apples in the pan. Add spices and cornstarch, continuing to cook over medium heat until apples are soft but not mushy, and there is a nice syrup. Smoothly layer onto cooked crust.

Cheesecake:
3- 8 oz packages of cream cheese at room temperature

1/2 cup sugar

3 eggs

2 teaspoons flour

1/4 cup cream

1 tsp vanilla bean paste

Whip cream cheese and sugar in electric mixer until smooth and fluffy. Add eggs, one at a time, beating until fully incorporated before adding the next one. In a small bowl, combine the cream and flour, stirring until smooth. Add to cream cheese mixture, along with vanilla bean paste. Mix until smooth and well blended. Pour slowly on top of apples (be careful here so you don't dislodge the apples).

Bake in a water bath for about 55 minutes at 325. Center should be set but jiggly when you pull it out. Cool, the refrigerate until serving. Right before serving, top with caramel sauce.

Caramel Sauce:
6 tablespoons butter

2/3 cup brown sugar

1/4 cup cream

Melt butter and brown sugar together over medium heat, until it boils. Cook for several minutes until mixture is thick and fragrant (like, say, caramel!). Add cream, and stir until combined. If your cream is cold, it may seize the caramel mixture and bubble furiously. Just keep stirring over the heat until it comes together. Cool until ready to top cheesecake.

By all accounts, this dessert was a hit, and nearly every one stuffed themselves with an entire slice, even after a rather filling dinner. Pardon the poor quality of the photo--it was taken with my cell phone camera, since I was at my parents' house.

Allie and the Giant Rainbow Cupcake

I pretty much demanded the Wilton Giant Cupcake pan for my birthday this year, and my niece's second birthday was the time to try it out. (I think I might have even begged to be allowed to make the cake, before I owned the pan.) For size perspective, see photo op with the normal-sized cupcakes. I had lots of ideas for how to make the cupcake, since decorating options are unlimited. I knew I didn't want to frost the bottom part, because I wanted the ridges of the pan to be obvious. I also knew I wanted a lot of color for the cake. Enter idea to try out not only my first ever cake in this pan, but my first ever attempt at a rainbow cake. Who needs to try things one at a time? Not me!

The mother of the birthday girl had said she wanted chocolate cake, though, so the top of the cake is chocolate. The birthday girl herself is a big fan of candy. I actually bought Mike and Ikes to use as giant sprinkles, but that didn't work out because they were a tropical variety of the candy, and the colors were pastel. Not what I was going for in this cake, but I'll definitely use them in the future. Besides, Jules loves M&Ms.

Now, this cake was not without it's own small disasters. I wanted a deep chocolate cake--something like a devil's food cake. After a lot of searching the internets, I decided on Hershey's Black Magic cake (which I've never made). Verdict: delicious, if you like impossibly spongy, soft cake. That can't stand the weight of itself, never mind of frosting. The normal-sized cupcakes were fine, but the giant cupcake top? Fell to pieces! I was so irritated that I didn't even take pictures. I promptly Googled "sturdy chocolate cake" and eventually decided on the Wilton recipe that came with the pan. Brilliant.

Now, about the rainbow-ing. I made a basic white cake recipe, because I wanted the colors to be pure, so there were no egg yolks involved (bonus: using up the million egg whites I always have leftover from all my ice cream making). Since I was pretty sure chocolate and rainbow cake would not bake at remotely the same pace, I made them separately, filling the opposite side of the pan with water. The rainbow cake. Baked. For. Forever. Seriously, I think it was more than 90 minutes. However, what came out was lovely and dense and very tasty. So I can't complain. (The cupcakes from the same batch were much lighter; the density is probably a result of the over-stirring to add the color, the waterbath next to it, and the temperature). I baked it at a very low temperature, because I wanted to avoid too much goldening on the outside, so that the colors would still be vivid. It was moderately successful, although I did trim at some of the ridges to brighten it up. Since I didn't frost it, I poked several holes into the bottom, and filled it with frosting, just to ensure it wouldn't be dry. And because everyone loves frosting.


Then I simply topped with the (second) chocolate cake, with a layer of frosting-glue between them. I gave the top a crumb coating, then finished with frosting swirls and M&Ms. The birthday girl herself wasn't too into it, but the adults at the party seemed pleased. Me? I can't wait to make the cake again...I have so many more ideas for it!