This week was my momma’s birthday – happy birthday, Mum! Being a chocolate-loving lady, I prepped a delicious birthday dessert for her: Devil’s Food Cupcakes with Buttercream Frosting.  Delicious.

A bloomin’ cupcake!

I had actually planned on baking her something else entirely (a gateau, something I will save for another time), but then I remembered I’d received a fancy baking cookbook for Christmas – Bouchon Bakery.  This is a book a tier or two fancier than I’m typically practiced (for example, all of its measurements are given both by weight and standard measures), and I was really excited to try things a little more challenging, or at least a little more varied in terms of ingredients.

Still, to start off I didn’t want to overburden myself with a recipe so complicated I was sure to screw it up (it was for a special occasion, after all), so devil’s food cake sounded like a safe option.  The ingredients were basic and the steps minimal, and as I often find it wasn’t terribly difficult to assemble.  The recipe mostly composed of turning the mixer on and walking away for 5 minutes at a time while ingredients whipped together.  The most taxing part of the process was folding together the dry and wet ingredients…and that’s just because I’m a big baby about folding.  UGH can’t I just mix these together without thinking about the??  GAWD.

Also, this recipe required mayo. Weird, right?

I also used the Basic Buttercream recipe from Bouchon Bakery, though it wasn’t really much different from any other buttercream recipe I’ve followed.  It was nice to have some specifics to take into consideration for the first time – specific weights of egg whites and butter, specific temperatures at which to stop melting the sugar and start pouring it into the egg whites – but in the end I think the easiest thing to screw up when it comes to buttercreams is the temperature of the butter itself.  For the first time ever, I made sure my 2 sticks of butter were completely room temperature (actually a little less, since my apartment was pretty cold) and it made an incredible difference in how easily it came together.  I also opted to use my whisk attachment this time instead of the regular mixer one, but I don’t think that made nearly the difference as the butter’s temperature, unfortunately proving again that being a slacker baker is not always in the best interest of your final product.  /sigh

Also, if that entire paragraph made no sense to you, I humbly suggest checking out my All About Buttercream recipe from last year. ^_^

Buttercreamy, yes?

Anyway, the good news is that a basic devil’s food recipe and a basic buttercream recipe yields a wicked batch of cupcakes.  I’ve never made devil’s food cake before, and I was really pleased with the way these turned out.  Very chocolatey, tender, and moist.  Tender to the point of being a little sticky, in fact; it was impossible to pick one up without it leaving a little chocolate residue on your hands.  Despite that, though, they held up very well; it was easy pick one up an eat it without worrying about getting crumbs all over the place or having it fall apart after one bite.  I was impressed.

There was one bizarre happening, though – you can see in the pictures that the liners are actually peeling away from the cupcakes themselves.  I’ve read a handful of reasons on why this happens, and the only one that applies to me is leaving them in the pan too long to cool.  Has anybody else run into this before?  It was really bizarre.

In the end, I brought them home to my Mom as dessert for her birthday dinner to much applause and huzzah-ing.  Many cupcakes were eaten by all!

Happy Birthday!

Since I used the recipe verbatim from Bouchon Bakery, I won’t post it here, but if you’ve never made devil’s food cake before, I highly recommend it!  Also, I’m hoping to bake more recipes from this cookbook as well, so I’ll hopefully be able to recommend this book to others.  Not, of course, that a cookbook of this level of fanciness really needs a noob-baker like me to recommend it for its own success. ^_^

Mary Gezo

Formerly of both n00bcakes and !Blog, the two magically become one on Spatialdrift; expect some lazy baking and serious nerditude. Also, I love semicolons.