Daring Bakers August, and Cupcakes!

The August 2009 Daring Bakers' challenge was hosted by Angela of A Spoonful
of Sugar and Lorraine of Not Quite Nigella. They chose the spectacular Dobos
Torte based on a recipe from Rick Rodgers' cookbook Kaffeehaus: Exquisite
Desserts from the Classic Caffés of Vienna, Budapest, and Prague.

It's time once again for the Daring Baker's Post...but I have been a bad baker. I only made part of my Challenge this month! I just have to admit, after reading that we were doing another layered genoise...my heart just sank. We've done so many, the only differences being the frosting or filling or flavors.
So, not having the time, money, or any occasion this month to make a wasted cake I already know how to do, I decided to just do the buttercream. It was a different method, and that at least was something I wanted to try. I was working on a recipe for some chocolate cupcakes, and decided to use that to top them.
Boy....was I glad I wasn't counting on bringing the cupcakes anywhere. I'm not sure if I didn't bring the eggs to a thick enough ribbon, (which I did do) or what else went wrong, but I ended up with a pudding-like frosting that melted the second it came out of the fridge. I even chilled it and re-whipped it, ganache style, and it still wouldn't hold. I guess a lot of the Daring Bakers had a similar problem. It's basically a French Buttercream, but with whole eggs instead of yolks. It also incorporates the chocolate before the butter goes in, instead of after. The one thing I did that the recipe didn't specify exactly was bring them up to 160 when cooking them, but that shouldn't have affected them--I was instructed to cook them a few minutes until thick, anyway. So, there's that. It should never have been thick enough to pipe well, but it should have at least held its form a little at room temperature. You can see by the photos how it's already begun to melt.
So I hope I don't get a DB demerit for not completing the challenge in its entirety...I just didn't want to do another layered chocolate genoise that no one would eat! I do plan on trying the buttercream again, as it really annoys me when something like that goes wrong...I just have to find the time.

Something else I'd like to touch on in this post is concerning the cupcakes. I have become dangerously obsessed with them. I usually am the type to resist a trend, but for some reason I have been all about cupcakes lately. You may remember some previous posts, complaining of flat cupcakes, and less-than-beautiful ones. Well, I have dived into the world of recipe writing, for cakes specifically. There are a lot of great cupcake recipes out there, but there are many more bad ones. I just remember the reason I started this blog--it wasn't to make other people's recipes and repost them. No, it was to create my own, and proudly give you something I could call my own, something I thought was truly great.
In my studying and experimenting, I have realized a basic fact--you can't have a really towering cupcake and still have it be super-soft and tender. There are two types of cake recipes--hi-ration and lean (or "shortened".) Simply put, a high-ratio recipe more or less has more sugar than flour, more eggs than fat, and more liquid than sugar. That's almost exactly the equation. It's very moist, very sweet, and very tender, but not exceptionally strong, because this cake must be made with bleached cake flour. The bleaching and fine texture allows for these ingredients to adhere to the flour better. Make it with all-purpose, and you end up with terribly dry cupcakes, which is exactly the problem with the ones I made. It's a high-ratio recipe, and should be perfect with cake flour. (I will be testing this theory soon.) There's not enough protein in a high-ratio cake recipe to support a big dome. That's why you see domes in muffins, which are made with all-purpose flour--it's stronger. Like a lean recipe, with more or less equal amounts of ingredients, and using all-purpose flour, you get a less rich cupcake, but one that is much stronger. Take a look at the picture of the two cupcakes--the one on the left is my favorite recipe, a high-ratio recipe made with cake flour. The other is Cook's Illustrated's Dark Cupcakes recipe, which is made with all-purpose flour even though it shouldn't be. It's actually terrible, and I don't recommend at all. But look at the mound on the chocolate "cupcake". More muffin-like.
I have also realized that some of the cupcakes I see that are very rounded are usually built up with great gobs of frosting first, which I don't generally agree with. There should be a balance of cake to frosting, and flavor shouldn't suffer for aesthetics.
So I have been working out my own recipes, trying to come up with a balance between tall and exquisitely tender. Lots of math, lots of notes, lots of cake flour. Lots of dirty looks from my husband. I think the answer may lie in a combination of flours, but I'm not sure how that would work. If I had to pick, I'd make a high-ratio cupcake every time--you just can't beat the flavor and texture, even if volume suffers.
Beyond working that out, I have started another small project, which I hope will interest you. I said before I want to post my own recipes on this blog, and I wasn't kidding. I have downloaded a menu from Sprinkles Cupcakes, and I have decided to create an original cupcake recipe for every flavor they have. I don't want to copy them exactly--I can't, I have never had a Sprinkles cupcake--but I am using their menu and flavors for inspiration. The first post will be soon, when I have a chance to make the Strawberry Cupcakes again and get a better photo, iron out the kinks a bit. But soon, I want to have the ultimate recipe for chocolate, vanilla, and all the other wonderfully creative flavors they have. I was making so many cupcakes...I needed a place to put them! So I'll be posting both here and on the other blog, titled The Sprinkles Project.