A Baking Weekend - Part 1

This weekend, I was very inspired to bake so in addition to the scheduled cake for the HCB group, I also made several other items. First, I did the Chocolate Butter Cupcakes with Chocolate Egg-White Buttercream from Rose's Heavenly Cakes. I made half a recipe of the cupcakes and the full recipe of the buttercream. Why, you asked, would I make another cake? Well, because I just received the 6-cavity Lekue silicone muffin pan and I feel compelled to test it. Also, I want to play with buttercream and the idea of making practice buttercream using shortening sounds plain gross (if there are shortening lover out there reading this, please don't take this personally). Anyway, back to the cupcake. It's very easy to make. The only thing is that you sorta have to plan ahead a bit because you have to boil the water and then mix it really well with the cocoa powder, then let it cool down to room temperature. The recipe said you can refrigerate it. But even that takes about 10-15 minutes to cool down (and this is half the recipe btw so you see how you should sorta plan ahead.) The buttercream is a bit more challenging. It tells you to beat the butter first until smooth and creamy. Rose suggests that you use the hand mixer for this if you only have 1 stand mixer - as you would need the stand mixer for the egg whites. So I did that. Then you beat the egg whites until foamy, add cream of tartar, beat again, then gradually add the fine sugar, until stiff peak. After all that, continue beating while adding butter by the tablespoon. Halfway through this, the buttercream looks like a soupy mess. Rose said that if the whole thing curdled, which I'm guessing what the soupy mess is, you should increase the speed and continue beating until it came together. Well, I did that and what feels like forever later, the consistency didn't changed. So I put the whole thing in the fridge - thinking that the reason why it still curdled is because it's too warm. True enough, after five minutes of refrigeration, I rebeat on high speed and it smoothed out. After all the butter is added, add the melted chocolate that's already cooled to room temperature. And you're done. Next is piping fun! It is so fun to pipe buttercream - provided you're not a perfectionist and fussed over every little imperfection (which I am kinda like that but I've decided since this is for personal consumption it just have to be fun and does not have to be perfect). I used a round tip, rose tip, and star tip and here's the result.


Aren't they cute? At least I think so. I'm very happy with the result. The one with the star tip makes me think of odd-shaped mushrooms.