Week 15: Harry's Weekend Treat: Butterbeer Cupcakes

I seem to be on a roll with the desserts lately and this week was no exception.  However, I decided I needed to step up my game a notch or two, so instead of simply mixing some ingredients, I went all out with trying my hand at the delicate art of cupcake making!

Not that difficult you say?  How about a cupcake with homemade buttercream frosting?!  Still not enough?  How about home made ganache as well?  Injected into the cupcake!?  Now how much would you pay?

Not only all of that, but it's even themed!  It's based on the butterbeer that they serve at The Wizarding World of Harry Potter in Orlando, Florida.  I've never been, but I'm a huge Harry Potter fan, so cupcakes based on a fictional drink that they serve at a theme park has to be good!

I saw this recipe on boingboing.net or maybe neatorama.  It sounded tasty and I liked the idea of injecting butterscotch into the heart of the cupcake for a bit of extra kick.  Plus, I want to practice my icing skills.  Win-win!

All of the ingredients were easy to find in the local store, so it was just a matter of making it!

It seemed like the biggest time sink would be waiting for the ganache to cool, so I started with that.  It's dead simple.  Pour a bag of butterscotch chips into a double boiler with a cup of heavy cream and heat it and stir until it's all mixed together.  My only recommendation might be to cut back on the cream or use more chips because my sauce came out very thin.  The blogger said it would, but even thinner than I thought it should.  I had some issues later because of it.

Then, while that was cooling I started making the cupcake batter (after turning on the oven to pre-heat.)  I mixed the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt with some help from an adorable little blonde girl.  Making fluffy butter by beating it rapidly is always fun.  Then adding the two sugars, followed by the eggs is old hat by now.

Butter flavoring is a bit of a surprise.  I didn't even know they made such a thing.  I must try it on popcorn later.

The recipe calls for "alternating" the buttermilk, cream soda, and flour mixture.  I'm not at all sure what that means so I faked it.  I cut both of the wet ingredients into two parts and then added them in turn with flour in between each.  It seemed to work fine.

Once it was all together, I spooned it into paper cupcake cups and put it in the 350 degree oven.

It filled about 14 regular cupcake cups and 4 mini-cupcake cups.  I baked it for 15 minutes and checked, but it wasn't quite ready.  It took about 18 minutes total in my oven.

While they were baking I made the frosting.  Yum!  Butter, butterscotch, vanilla, butter flavoring, and almost a pound of powdered sugar.  I say again, Yum!  I didn't end up using a full pound of powdered sugar.  I was probably about a cup short of that when the frosting looked and tasted right to me.  I had my wife try it and she said "It tastes like canned frosting."  I may have said something unkind at that point.  I don't really recall.  In any case, I disagree.  It did kind of remind me of canned frosting right after I made it, but after it had sat a little while it actually got much better.  Maybe it needed to rest like a steak.

I next used a plastic condiment bottle as suggested in the recipe to inject some extra butterscotch into the heart of the cupcakes.  This is one of the places that I think showed that my ganache was too thin.  It worked perfectly fine, but in the end the liquid just got absorbed by the cupcake.  I was expecting more of a little butterscotch syrup ball in the middle and was somewhat disappointed. I may try it next time with more of a syrup.

I used a strange little device that looked like an accordion to frost these.  It worked well, but only held enough frosting for two cakes at a time and was a pain to reload.  Next time I'll use a bag.  They look funny but I got some good icing practice in.

Then I put some more of the ganache on top as a decoration.  Here is where the thinness really hurt.  I made pretty spirals and shapes that dissolved into puddles almost instantly.  Thicker would have been better.

Result:  YUM!  The cake part came out good, but the frosting is amazing!  Possibly because of the combination of cake and frosting, but amazing in any case.  The ganache in the middle doesn't add much in my opinion. I definitely think it's a nice change from chocolate or vanilla cupcakes and will probably make them again for a party or something.  I recommend them highly!