Strawberry Chocolate w/ Chocolate Ganache

A friend of mine has just opened her Etsy shop for Bath and Body stuff with aromatherapy kind of things! Her blog can be found here: http://nickileigh.blogspot.com/


And her etsy shop here: Bare with me on this one, I didn't exactly write the recipe down. Whoops! Oh well. This came about when my sister's boyfriend wanted a strawberry and cream kind of dessert, and I originally was gonna plan on some kind of strawberrys and cream cupcake (or peachs and cream). However, being a woman, there was a need for chocolate. And a white cupcake with chocolate topping just wasn't gonna do it. In any case, here we go!
As usual, I recommend making the frosting first,

Chocolate Ganache:

• 5 oz bitter sweet chocolate
• 2 oz unsweetened
• 1/2 cup whipping cream
• 1/2 stick butter
• 1 cup powder sugar
• 1/4 cup whole milk
• 1 tsp vanilla

1. Chop the chocolate and put into a heat proof bowl.
2. Heat cream until bubbles form around the edge of the pan and pour over the chocolate. Let it sit for about a minute and then stir until combined.
3. Add butter to chocolate, and stir.
4. Whisk together sugar, salt, milk, and vanilla.
5. Pour the sugar mix onto the chocoate and stir until combined and smooth.
6. Let it sit at room temperature until it has thickened. Stir occasionally.
7. Once at room temperature, beat with a mixer until fluffy. (Though mine never turns fluffy.)

Strawberry Chocolate Cupcakes:

• 3/4 cups or 1 1/2 sticks of butter
• 2 cups sugar
• 3 eggs
• 2 1/2 cups flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 2 Tbsp instant espresso
• 3 Tbsp cocoa powder
• 1/2 cup cream (you can use milk, I just had cream at the time)
• 2 tsp vanilla
• 3/4 - 1 cup of strawberries, finely chopped

1. Preheat oven to 350°.
2. Beat butter until soften and add in sugar. Beat until light and fluffy, roughly about 3 minutes.
3. Add egg yolks in one at a time, beating for about 30 seconds in between. Put egg whites aside for now.
4. In another bowl, sift and/or whisk together your dry ingredients.
5. In a measuring cup, measure out your cream and vanilla.
6. Add in about 1/3 of your dry mixture to your butter mixture and mix. Add in some of your cream mix.
7. Alternate between these two and end with your dry mix.
8. Mix in your strawberries.
9. In a bowl, beat your whites until fluffy. Gently fold in the whites into your batter.
10. Fill the cupcake holders to about 3/4 full. Bake for about 20 minutes and test with a toothpick to make sure they are baked completely.
11. Set on a rack to cool completely before frosting.

Notes: This made about 2 1/2 dz cupcakes. Oddly, some of mine collapsed in on themselves! Go figure. However, it still tasted awesome!

Chocolate Cherry Cupcakes w/ Chocolate Ganache

What's better than chocolate and cherries? Perhaps putting it into cupcakes?

Two kinds of cherries in this one! I wanted the maraschino cherries, and the juice, and added in bing cherries. Make sure you have plenty of time to chop. This took awhile. Not much more to say this time.
Derived originally from the old fashioned chocolate cupcake recipe and ganache from Cupcake Bakeshop (if I recall correctly). I also highly recommend making the ganache first.

Chocolate Ganache

• 5 oz bitter sweet chocolate
• 2 oz unsweetened
• 1/2 cup whipping cream
• 1/2 stick butter
• 1 cup powder sugar
• 1/4 cup whole milk
• 1 tsp vanilla

1. Chop the chocolate and put into a heat proof bowl.
2. Heat cream until bubbles form around the edge of the pan and pour over the chocolate. Let it sit for about a minute and then stir until combined.
3. Add butter to chocolate, and stir.
4. Whisk together sugar, salt, milk, and vanilla.
5. Pour the sugar mix onto the chocoate and stir until combined and smooth.
6. Let it sit at room temperature until it has thickened. Stir occasionally.
7. Once at room temperature, beat with a mixer until fluffy.

Chocolate Cherry Cupcakes

• 3/4 cup butter (1.5 sticks)
• 2 cups sugar
• 3 eggs
• 2 cups flour
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 3/4 cup cocoa powder
• 2 Tbsp instant espresso powder
• 1 1/2 cups milk
• 2 tsp vanilla
• 3/4 to 1 cup cherries

1. Preheat oven to 350°.
2. Beat butter until softened. Add sugar and beat until light and fluffy. Roughly takes about 3 minutes.
3. Mix the vanilla and milk together in a cup.
4. Add one egg at a time, beating each for about 30 secs before adding the next.
5. In a seperate bowl, sift and whisk together flour, baking soda, salt, cocoa, and espresso.
6. Add about 1/3 of the dry to the butter and sugar, and beat to combine.
7. Add 1/2 of the milk/vanilla mix to the batter and beat to combine.
8. Alternate between the two, eventually ending with dry mix.
9. Add in your cherries and mix well.

Notes: Made about 2 dozen and went by quickly! I added some of the cherry juice into the batter. If you do this, make sure you add flour as needed so that the batter isn't too liquidy.

Puerto Rican Rice

This is definitely not a cupcake, but still quite tasty! Puerto Rican rice. mm mm. Originally a family friend gave us this recipe, but its so worth sharing! Now, I apologize for the lack of quality pictures. My camera died and I was using my cell phone to take pictures.

This rice goes well with BBQ, ribs, and shrimp and serves roughly about 8 depending on how big of a serving you get.

Puerto Rican Rice

• 2 Tbsp Olive Oil or enough to cover the bottom of the pan
• 1/2 small onion, chopped well
• 1 bunch of cilantro, fresh, chopped
• 1 jar pimento stuffed olives
• 2 envelopes of Sazón
• 2 Tbsp Adobo
• 2 tsp garlic powder
• 1 1/2 cups long grain rice (not minute rice)
• 3 cups water

1. Chop up onions and cilantro well.
2. In a large, somewhat deep, but not too deep, pan, add your olive oil, or enough to cover the bottom of the pan.
3. Sauté onions until they are clear and cilantro until it is cooked down.
4. Add water and bring to a boil.
5. Add the rice, seasonings, and olives (juice too if you'd like) into the mix, bring to a boil again and cover.
6. Lower the heat and let it simmer until it is done. About 20-30 minutes.
7. Serve and enjoy!

The next time I make this, I'll have some better pictures and get these all replaced.

Chewy Spiced Oatmeal Raisin Cookies

No pictures this time. In fact, I accidently burnt these cookies! But they still taste really good!
I believe the original recipie came from bakebites.com . Forgot to write that down. In any case, hurricane Ike didn't give us a drop of rain. But before we knew it wasn't coming, I had baked cookies so we had something to snack on that was tasty.
Chewy Spiced Oatmeal Raising Cookies

• 1 1/2 cups AP flour
• 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1/4 tsp nutmeg
• 1/2 tsp allspice
• 1/2 tsp cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 2 sticks (1 cup) butter, unsalted and softened
• 1 cup packed brown sugar
• 1 cup granulated sugar
• 2 large eggs
• 3 cups old fashioned rolled oats (do NOT use instant)
• 1 1/2 cup raisins

1. Preheat oven to 350°.
2. Whisk together baking powder, flour, and spices.
3. In a seperate bowl, beat butter on medium until creamy.
4. Add sugar to butter and continue to beat for about 3 minutes.
5. Beat in eggs one at a time and beat for about 30 seconds in between.
6. Stir in dry mix to wet slowly.
7. Sir in oats and raisins.
8. Cook for about 20-25 minutes. 20 minutes was plenty for mine. Allow them to cool on a cooling rack before enjoying!

Just a note on cooking time, they may not look done, but if you leave them in too much longer, they'll burn. I also greased my pans with a cooking spray and they still stuck a little. Not quite sure how many cookies this made. I'd say about 4 dozen. I read somewhere, but didn't have time to try it, that you can make your raisins more plump by boiling them in water or juice! I'll have to attempt that next time. I also want to try beating egg whites and folding them in at the end to see if I can't make them any chewier.

Greetings and Pineapple cupcakes

Greetings cupcake fans!
Allow me to introduce myself and how this blog came to be.

My name is Megan, however, my online persona/handle/whatever you may call it is Stormphyre (or variations of). Stormphyre is actually a small dragon of sorts. And as dragons like to hoard shiny things, this one enjoys hoarding cupcakes too! (Some of them are shiny!) I enjoy art, particularly fantasy, dragons (obviously), mythology, ceramics, herpetology, field herping, pet care, reading, roleplaying of sorts, and baking (apparently). I'm still in college for a business administration and originally had dreams of opening my own pet store of awesomeness. Now its become a dream to open a cupcake store. Or both!

Now why am I making this blog? Some months ago, some random spur had me wanting to make cupcakes. A friend introduced me to Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World. And on I went on a search for the golden vanilla vegan cupcake mix, and thus tracked through a few blogs. There were so many nifty cupcakes and on I went on a cupcake binge and have yet to come off! Pity my family, however. This happened in the middle of the summer when everyone was watching what they ate. Oh well!

I consider myself a noob at this all, and my decorating skills rather suck. The last two batches of icing before these pineapple cupcake turned out very runny and not so happy like. At the moment, my advanced ceramic class is my set of guinea pigs when it comes to testing cupcakes.


I think that's all for now. Now, On to the cupcakes!



Hurricane Ike was expected to hit where I live, but now hits up in Houston instead, putting us on the south side. Baking has become a stress relief for me (too bad its fattening, but oh well!) and after finding that we weren't going to get hit as much as we anticipated (and stressed out about), cupcakes had to be made! A neighbor and I went to go hunting for food and drink mixing stuffs. Fast food. Lo and behold, several places were open. In particular, our local HEB grocery store! In we went and out I came with pineapples, as she had been talking about making pineapple drinks of sorts.

Anyway, I like to make my icing first so it has time to set up, and I find it seems to work better.

Original source and deviated from Crazy about Cupcakes by Krystina Castella.

Vanilla Butter Cream:

• 1 stick (1/2 cup) + 3 Tbsp of unsalted butter at room temperature (I used lightly salted for the 3 Tbsp and didn't seem to have a problem, but I don't recommend using anything highly salted.)
• 3 cups confectioner's or powder sugar
• 2 tsp vanilla extract
• 2 Tbsp heavy whipping cream (You can also use milk, but I find the cream has a better flavor)

1. Cut butter into smaller chunks, it makes it a little easier and messier to blend. Cream the butter and sugar together until well blended.
2. Add vanilla and blend.
3. Add cream (or milk) and blend until well mixed. If too runny, add more sugar; if too thick, add more cream.

Cupcakes:

• 2 sticks/1cup of butter, unsalted (or lightly), room temp
• 1 1/2 cups sugar
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 4 large eggs, separated
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 3 1/2 cups All purpose flour
• 4 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 cup milk
• 1/2 cup pineapple juice
• 20 oz or more crushed pineapple

1. Preheat oven to 350°F.
   
2. In a large bowl, cream together the butter and sugar for about 3-5 minutes.
   
3. Add in egg yolks (set whites to the side) one at a time, beating in between for about 30 seconds.


4. Add in vanilla, mix.


5. In a separate bowl, mix flour, baking powder, and salt.


6. Slowly add dry mix with the wet, alternating between dry and milk. Add in pineapple juice slowly after the milk is used, and end with dry.


7. Optional: I ran the crushed pineapple through a food processor so it was even smaller, and add into the mix.


8. Whip the egg whites until you have stiff peaks. Gently fold in the whites into the mix.


9. Fill the cupcake liners about 3/4 full and bake for about 20 minutes. Run a toothpick through the center of the cupcake to test it. Make sure the toothpick comes out clean; if not, continue to bake for a few minutes longer. Let them cool completely on a rack before frosting.
   
   

Originally I had only added 3 cups of flour and when I took the cupcakes out of the oven, they shrunk a good bit. I'd say about 1/4 of the size they were right when I pulled them out. So I added roughly about 1/2 cup more of flour and the next group did wonderful. Now, these cupcakes did not turn out horribly sweet or have a lot of pineapple flavor to them. I plan on adding more pineapple next time and seeing if I can't get the to have more pineapple. However, the frosting is definitely very sweet, so they turn out nice between the cake and frosting.

This recipe makes about 30 regular sized cupcakes.