The question everyone asks is… how do you get the frosting inside? Once the cupcakes have cooled, you can make the frosting and put it into a large pastry bag with a big star tip. Turn the cupcakes upside down, shove the star tip into their behinds, and squeeze. The cupcake has some air pockets in it, so there is a surprising amount of space for the frosting. You will be able to feel when it’s “full” and the tip will sort of pop out.

Once you’ve filled them all, you can pass over with a knife to clean up any excess icing. To put the glaze on, I take the filled cupcakes and gently swirl them in the warm chocolate glaze. You have to use the glaze at about 100 degrees F or it won’t set properly. Since 100 degrees is just above body temperature, there is an easy way to test for 100F without a thermometer. Dab a little glaze in the indentation that’s just below the middle of your lower lip (a very sensitive part of the body that interprets temperature well.) The glaze should feel just slightly warm but not too hot.

To make the designs on top, just hold out a little of the vanilla frosting in a bowl. Thin it out with milk a bit and put it in a ziploc bag. Cut a small hole and start looping. If you really want it to look right, with the chocolate and the loops melded together, prepare your bag of piping icing before you start the glaze process and do it right away. Then the loosened vanilla frosting will melt into the glaze a bit and look authentic. Since she’s a Laura I made the loop-de-loops more L-like in her honor.

I have also made these with a filling more akin to a whoopie pie filling, which is also a very good way to go, and even more Hostess-like.

Here are the recipes to go with the process described above:

Dark Chocolate Cupcakes

makes 18 cupcakes

Ingredients:

• 1 cup sugar
• 1 3/4 cup cake flour
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 3/4 tsp baking soda
• 5 1/2 Tblsp butter, cut in pieces
• 1/3 cup vegetable oil
• 3/4 cup dark cocoa powder
• 3/4 cup water
• 1 egg
• 1 egg yolk
• 3/4 cup buttermilk

Method:

• Heat oven to 375. Prepare cupcake pans with foil liners and nonstick spray.
• In a large bowl, sift together sugar, flour, salt, and baking soda.
• Over low heat, warm the butter, oil, cocoa powder, and water, until the butter is melted. Whisk until smooth.
• Stir the warm liquids into the dry ingredients and mix with a wooden spoon or spatula to fully combine.
• Add eggs, vanilla, and buttermilk and stir until smooth. You may need to use a whisk to get it completely smooth.
• Fill cupcake liners to 3/4 full. Bake about 15 minutes until center of cupcakes spring back when you touch them. Cool completely before filling.

Vanilla Frosting Filling

The secret to making this frosting light and fluffy is just to beat the hell out of it.

Ingredients:

• 1 stick (1/2 cup) butter, softened
• about 4 cups powdered sugar
• 1/4 cup milk
• 1 tsp vanilla

Method:

• Put butter, 2 cups powdered sugar, milk, and vanilla in the bowl of an electric mixer with the paddle attachment. Beat a few minutes on high, until very creamy.
• Add remaining powdered sugar, 1/2 cup at a time, and continue beating until thick and creamy. Add more powdered sugar as needed to get the desired thickness.
• Keep beating on high for about 5 more minutes and the frosting will be fluffy as a cloud!
• This icing will harden if chilled, so use at room temperature and don’t make it too far in advance of when you’ll be using it.

Chocolate Glaze

Ingredients:

• 1 cup dark chocolate chips or chopped chocolate
• 1 stick (1/2 cup) butter, cut in pieces
• 1 Tblsp corn syrup

Method:

• Heat everything together in a saucepan over very low heat so you don’t burn the chocolate. When the chocolate is about half melted, turn off heat and keep stirring to fully melt.
• Use this at about 100 degrees F or it won’t set properly. Since 100 degrees is just above body temperature, there is an easy way to test for 100F without a thermometer. Dab a little glaze in the indentation that’s just below the middle of your lower lip (a very sensitive part of the body that interprets temperature well.) The glaze should feel just slightly warm but not too hot.

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So, this year I wanted to try natural Easter egg dye, so I enlisted my nieces and nephews for some experiments. First, I put some dye on the kids to see if they would get a rash. Oh my gosh not really! I didn’t mean that kind of experiment. That would be horrible. I meant I enlisted them to help me experiment with dying eggs. So first, we boiled red cabbage for 30 minutes and then dyed eggs in it. They turned bright blue! They had to sit in the dye for a couple of hours, but still! For the yellows, we used turmeric (for the darker ones) and saffron flowers (for the lighter ones.) It wasn’t real saffron, it was something called saffron flowers that was $1.69 for a whole bag. I don’t know what it was. But we’re on a need to know basis, and all I know is that it was a bag of little red thingies that kind of looked like saffron and made the eggs light yellow. My mom was seriously stressed about the turmeric because turmeric stains everything. So be careful with that one. I wanted to try beets for red eggs but beets are gross. Maybe by next year I’ll be mature enough to handle beets. Probably not.

So then we tried this other crazy technique from Serious Eats where you put stuff from your garden on a raw egg, then wrap it in onion skins, then fabric, then boil for 10 minutes. We did some in onion and some in cabbage. The cabbage ones are the lighter ones. It was like a fun science experiment and the kids really liked it! You know, for a really short time as kids do. On some you could totally make out the leaf and flower patterns!

So go ahead – bookmark this shit and then somewhere around November you’ll be like, what is this bookmark, why am I saving something for Easter? What the hell? And then just forget about it and go on with your life. You’re welcome. And happy Easter.

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Last year I cut up some old neckties from a thrift store and made these gorgeous silk-dyed eggs… a stunning result from a surprisingly simple project!

These lemon raspberry cake balls kind of look like eggs, and the white chocolate is an Easter-y shade…

You can use the Chinese Tea-Egg concept and make these cool crackly-looking eggs…

After which, the crackly eggs can become deliciously deviled.

This year, I’m planning to do that thing where you use only natural dyes like turmeric, beets, grass, and onion skins to color the eggs. I might try some more of the silk ones too, because those were a big hit. But I’m not one of those bloggers who makes stuff in advance to blog about it in a timely fashion, ie BEFORE Easter, because I’m LAZY and don’t want to make things twice. No worries, it will be in next year’s roundup, or perhaps somewhat inappropriately posted next week.

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I know the icing isn’t perfect here- that’s the beauty of making something for a person who is only 5. Perfection is not what they’re after. They are after copious amounts of frosting and candy on a cake that’s shaped like something other than a cake, which makes them pretty easy to please. I think the biggest compliment came when, after admiring the cake for several minutes, my nephew turned to my Dad and with saucer eyes and his jaw hanging open, and said- “GRAMPA- do you realize this CAR is EATABLE?!?!?”

Eatable indeed! I made this somewhat nasty hot pink strawberry cake in a 9×13 pan and then cut a third of it off, lengthwise. Then I cut the long skinny piece I had in half perpendicular. Like this:

I flipped the 2 pieces 90 degrees and set them next to each other on top of the remaining large cake and stuck them on with frosting. They were kind of slope-y which actually made it look more like a car. I wanted really sturdy, fluffy frosting for this, so I used a fluffy meringue frosting (my mom made it so I’m not sure how- something about like this) and tinted it blue to attach the cake pieces and cover the whole thing in gobs and gobs of icing. I made a little bit of white royal icing for the windows, doors, and writing. Tic-tacs for lights and blinkers, oreos for wheels, sour belts for racing stripes and windshield wipers, some weird white tootsie rolls for the bumpers, and voila! A car that any 5-year-old would love.

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The gingerbread casbah came into being because every year, we throw a themed Christmas party for around 100 of our closest friends. Since we just took a honeymoon to the Middle East, we thought we could try out some new tricks at a Middle East-themed Christmas party. After all, that is where the whole Christmas thing started, right? An evite full of bad puns later (“we are Beiruting for you to come”, and so forth) we had our “Christmas at the Casbah” party ready to go, and all we needed was an impressive centerpiece.

This is not really a casbah, but a typical courtyard house. (Casbah sounds cooler though, so that’s more of a marketing-focused name for it.) On our honeymoon, we stayed in a beautiful hotel in Old City of Damascus called Beit Al Mamlouka, and I very loosely modeled the casbah on my recollections of how it looked. I say “very loosely” because their floors weren’t made of sour belts and jujubes, and their walls weren’t edible.

For the gingerbread, I used a recipe that C&H tweeted me- and it was great. Alas, I haven’t actually tasted it, but from a construction point of view it was tops – simple to make, very easy to roll out, not too sticky, sturdy, and kept its shape during baking. Also, it smells delicious, which adds a nice extra sensory dimension to the house. The royal icing that glues the whole thing together is just a stiff mixture of egg whites and powdered sugar with a pinch of cream of tartar, mixed with the paddle attachment of a Kitchen-Aid.

I did most of the shape-cutting freehand, but used a star cutters for the front windows. To make the windows, we rolled out the dough and put it on a silpat. Then we cut shapes out and arranged crushed jolly ranchers inside. When they baked, they became clear and solid. You have to let them cool while carefully loosening them from the silpat, as the candy stays soft and molten for about 30 minutes after coming out of the oven. Once they harden fully, they are structurally quite sound.

I thought that doing this alone would be both boring and incredibly frustrating and also not come out as well, so I assembled a crack team to help out. Rodney the pastry chef is always an excellent addition to this type of team, and did lots of the rolling, fine icing work, and construction assistance. Heather took care of cobblestones and windows, while MJ formed small furnishings including the excellent hookah.

I am a firm believer that everything on a true gingerbread house should be edible, and should be candy. Also, I can make like anything out of marzipan or fondant- ergo, marzipan and fondant are cheating. Sculpting something out of a tootsie roll is so much more impressive. So I refused to allow any non-edible, non-candy/gingerbread/icing objects adorn the house.

I bought electric flicker tea lights to illuminate it during the party, to make the windows shine. Merry Christmas everyone!

Here’s the breakdown of what’s what:

• Windows: crushed jolly ranchers baked into the gingerbread
• Tile floor: rainbow sour belts, jujubes, licorice wheels, and silver dragees
• Balcony floors: red hots, tic tacs, and silver dragees
• Balcony railings: sesame candies, licorice wheels (unrolled), jujubes
• Cobblestones: formed tootsie roll slices with yellow sprinkles
• Hanging lamps: licorice wheels and Haribo raspberry gummies
• Hookah: deconstructed tootsie rolls, sour belts, and licorice wheels
• Table: gingerbread star with dragees and jujubes
• Chair: sesame candies and tootsie rolls
• Tree: iced cookie with Haribo raspberry gummy and tootsie roll
• Camels: iced cookies with sprinkles

I wasn’t able to find any other instances of Middle Eastern gingerbread architecture on the web, but I did come across some gingerbread structures of note. Here are a few of my favorites from around teh interwebz.

• Max’s cave from Where The Wild Things Are, from A Table for Two <<<btw, AMAZING!!!>>>
• Gingerbread Houseboat from Houseboat Eats
• Gingerbread Woodcutters Cabin from Sweetopia
• Not gingerbread, bacon and licorice house from Almost Bourdain
• Cool 2 story house by Brown Sugar Bee

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Martha Stewart doesn’t usually do it for me, but my GOODNESS these are lovely ghost and witch hat petit-fours. They don’t look as hard or time-consuming as I expected for a MS recipe but they are still kind of a lot of work. But how cool are they? Basically the recipe tells you take a cake and cut it into circles, then pipe a big pointy hunk of frosting on it, then pour a glaze over it. So if you bought like a pound cake or a banana bread or something instead of making a cake yourself, it would be a lot easier.

Also on Martha Stewart, these cute creepy cupcakes! I especially like the mummy ones and they have the added bonus of seeming the easiest to make. Find instructions here – if you dare. That’s, if you dare to spend an entire day making cupcakes because this would take forever.

Of course, if you’re more into the gruesome stuff, you could always follow this Instructables project which shows you how to hollow out a creepy doll and serve guacamole in it.

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The main issue that I had is that the recipe calls for fresh walnuts. Here’s where I admit I don’t actually know what a fresh walnut looks like. It also said to skin the walnuts, ie remove the papery skin part… which sounded really vexing and actually totally completely WAS vexing. That is because I felt like I was in a walnut skinning sweatshop with my tiny fingers painstakingly working the skins off of walnuts for hours on end. Welcome to my sweatshop. Note the tiny pile of hard-won naked walnut pieces on the bottom left. Ugh.

In the end, it was all totally worth it. The dish was beautiful, unusual, and super delicious. It didn’t taste strictly Mexican, and in fact had shades of the Middle East in the flavor profile. It was also absolutely gorgeous. Even for a lazy slacker like me- it was totally worth the effort!  Next time I will try just NOT skinning the walnuts… or try to track down those fresh walnuts once and for all.

Luckily for me, and for you, Elise from Simply Recipes posted Diana Kennedy’s recipe in full right here! For the record, Elise doesn’t skin the walnuts. Of course, if  you’d like to open your very own walnut sweatshop… be my guest!

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Of course, I had to make the cake delicious as well as beautiful, because it’s totally stupid to make a cool-looking cake that tastes only so-so. I made a double recipe of hazelnut brown butter cake from Smitten Kitchen and a brown sugar buttercream from Epicurious. I divided the batter between a 5 inch pan and a 10 inch pan. The hazelnut brown butter cake was great to use for this project, because not only was it delicious, it was also dense and heavy, so it really helped everything stay in place. I chose the brown sugar buttercream because I wanted dirt-colored frosting but didn’t fancy chocolate.

As to the decorations, my goal was to make the cake as naturally tasty as possible- meaning no gum paste or real flowers or other such nonsensse. Hence, I used marzipan for the kayaks, leaves, and flowers. (You might be wondering why I opted to make the kayaks in such ugly colors, but I felt it important to faithfully represent the neon hues of each of their real-life kayaks.) I used whole hazelnuts for the boulders, and ground pistachios for the gravel. The blue icing was just the brown sugar buttercream dyed and marbled with 2 shades of blue.

TIP: if you’re marzipan-challenged or even just really lazy, the calla lily is by far the easiest flower to pull off. Roll out a thin snake. Flatten a colored piece into a circle. Wrap circle around snake and pinch off at the bottom.

Now I KNOW I could have made those flowers thinner and more perfect, but to be honest, I’m a little attention-challenged. And impatient. But I swear no one noticed the extra thick petals. I’m all about the gestalt anyway, know what I’m sayin’? Plus when you’re getting a surprise kayak wedding cake for free, you really can’t expect me to give myself carpal tunnel over the frickin’ calla lilies. Thought that counts and all that.

In conclusion, this was a super-fun project, and if I could go crazy like this with other wedding cakes and also make them somewhat imprefectly with no negative consequencs, I would most definitely be more amenable to making them! So keep that in mind if you’re planning to ask for one…

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Dear Karen,

I put your foodgawker entry for lemon raspberry white chocolate cake balls on my “favorites” list.  That is such an ingenious recipe.  I clicked on it tonight because I wanted to make them, and-screeeeeee!!!!!  It was gone! I tried to find out the date that you posted the recipe so that I could look it up in your archives, but was unable to get the date.  May I please have a copy of that recipe, pretty please?

This happens sometimes, because when I switched my site’s web host earlier this year, I didn’t move over all the recipes from my archive site. If you have a recipe you can’t find please let me know via email or Twitter, and I’ll be happy to post it for you too!

Chris: ENJOY  this recipe from the archives, and please let us know how your cake balls turn out!

******************

After making my little lemon cakes last weekend, I had essentially the equivalent of an 8-inch square cake all in pieces in a bowl. After googling the term “cake scraps recipe” I came across Bakerella’s Red Velvet Cake Balls and thought, hmmmm… intriguing. The concept: smoosh together cake and frosting, form it into a ball, and coat it in chocolate. I decided to dig in and take the risk, and came up with this concoction by using equal parts of inspiration, ingenuity and overconfidence. Often that combination equals a failed dessert, some tears, and a huge mess, but luckily this time it all came together.

The only even remotely tricky part of this recipe is coating the balls with the white chocolate. Ideally the chocolate will be tempered so it will create a hard shell. There is a trick to doing that which I will explain in the recipe and which doesn’t require a thermometer or any gadget or device other than a spatula and some patience. Oh, and if you’re making something experimental, it never hurts to bust out the fancy garnishes- in this case, a dusty bottle of crystallized violets I brought back from Paris maybe 6 years ago, and had never used, and my trusty box o’ gold leaf. (I swear it’s a mystery, because as much as I use that stuff, it’s always a full box.)

I’ll admit that I was skeptical about whether these cake nuts cojones nads testicles balls would be worth the effort, but they were pretty fabulous! I’m not a huge white chocolate lover, but I knew it would work really well with the lemon as long as I balanced the sweetness of the white chocolate with a super lemony center marbled with some slightly tart raspberries. One guest predicted that “cake balls will be the new cupcakes.” You heard it here first.

Lemon Raspberry White Chocolate Cake Balls
This will make 20-30 balls depending on how big you make them. I got about 24 golf ball-sized balls out of my cake.

Ingredients:

• 1 8-inch lemon cake or equivalent (you can use this yummy recipe, but just make half of it and bake it in an 8- or 9-inch square or round pan)
• 8 oz. cream cheese
• 1/4 cup powdered sugar
• zest of 2 lemons
• a couple handfuls of raspberries
• 12 oz. to 1 lb. good quality white chocolate (I used El Rey 34% pistoles from Whole Foods)

Method:

• In a mixer, combine cream cheese, sugar, and lemon zest until blended and frosting-like.
• Crumble cake into a bowl and mix with frosting. You will need to use your fingers to get them well-combined because it’s really almost impossible to get this mixed with a spoon.
• Add a couple handfuls of raspberries and smoosh them in with your hand, but don’t mix them all the way in because it looks cooler if it’s marbled.
• Roll into balls and put on a tray or cookie sheet. Put the tray into the freezer for about an hour.
• Now you have to temper the white chocolate. Put white chocolate pieces into top of a double boiler*. (if you are using chunk chocolate, chop it into smaller pieces first.)
• Heat water in bottom part of double boiler by itself, without the top part on it. When the water boils, turn it off. Then with the heat off, place the chocolate on top of the hot water.
• Stir chocolate with a spatula, scraping the sides, to melt it. Keep it over the water until the chocolate is about halfway melted. Then take the chocolate out of the water and put it on the counter (on top of a towel to stabilize it.)
• Keep stirring and the pieces will keep melting. Keep stirring and the pieces will keep melting. Keep stirring… you get the idea. It will take awhile and you will think it won’t all melt but it will.
• The chocolate is ready for dipping when it’s melted but around 90 degrees. How do you check this? One part of your body that’s sensitive to temperature is the piece of skin just below the middle of your lower lip. So if you dip your finger into the chocolate and press it to the part under your lower lip, it should feel cold. If the chocolate is melty but feels cold when you do that, you are ready to dip. If it feels warm, keep stirring and testing.
• Once it’s to this point you have maybe 5 minutes to dip. For me this meant the chocolate in the bowl started getting hard after I had dipped about half of the balls, so I had to melt it in the water again and then remix and recool it for the second half of the balls. As I said, this is the only tricky part of the recipe.
• Put a ball into the chocolate and use a fork to prod it around then to lift it out. Shake off excess chocolate and put on a drying rack over a piece of parchment or another pan to harden. If you are garnishing do it before the chocolate sets.
• If you’ve tempered correctly, you can keep these out at room temperature for a good long while and they won’t fade, sweat, or melt. Don’t put them in the fridge or they’ll get watery condensation on them.

* If you don’t have a double boiler (I don’t!) you can use a pot and put the chocolate in a metal bowl to melt.

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My thoughts: 1) It would make a cool t-shirt pattern. 2) How do you make white jello? 3) mmmmmm delicious jello.

You can get the recipe and see more pictures at I’ve Gotta Little Space To Fill.

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