Peaches & Cream Cupcakes

Week 9: Making Things Taste Good

This week's cupcakes were purely to try and finally perfectly "wow" Morgan with my cupcakes. Morgan loves peaches, so when I found this Peaches & Cream Cupcake recipe I thought it was worth a shot.

I am finding that most of my cupcakes start with the same vanilla cupcake and vanilla buttercream recipes. So, for this cupcake I went with a vanilla sour cream cupcake batter and I added a significant amount of the best peach jam that I could find...and by best I mean the jam that had the most peach 'chunks' in it.

With the buttercream frosting I stayed with what I've got. So many people like the vanilla buttercream I have done before that I didn't want to mess to much with a good thing. So, I toned down the vanilla flavor just a tad and added the same peach jam to the buttercream as I did to the batter. the frosting turned out really pretty with all of the peach chunks in it. But to take it one step farther, I added a slice of peach to the top of the cupcake. I think it makes it look really happy!

These turned out really good, although not 'life changing' as I had hoped. I would make them again, but there are they are not my standing favorite. I think I set my hopes to high this time. :)

Overall Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Raspberry White Chocolate Cupcakes

Week 8: Making Things Taste Good

Yum! All I can say is...Yum!

I can't even remember why or how I made these because the only part I can remember is how delicious they were and how much everyone liked them...even my husband. Morgan loves me very much, but he is the hardest to please. I know it is because he is waiting for that one cupcake that is 'life-altering' for him...I just haven't found it yet. However, these cupcakes were his favorite so far and everyone else that tried they really liked them as well.

These cupcakes started with a basic vanilla cupcake recipe. At the end, I added some raspberry extract and mixed in a huge handful of white chocolate chips. The idea was that the chocolate chips would turn into little molten pockets of chocolate while they were baking. This did work...and wow, were they delicious warm right out of the oven, but the experience just wasn't the same once they had cooled all of the way. Not to say that they still weren't fabulous.

The frosting was a raspberry buttercream. Again, I started with my basic vanilla buttercream recipe and then added the pureed raspberries to the buttercream at the end. The trick here was to not only puree the raspberries in the food processor, but then strain the puree through a very fine sieve. This eliminated all the seeds and left me with a wonderfully bright pink a smoothie type liquid that I added to the buttercream. (Note: I did not add any other milk or liquid to the buttercream, since the raspberries added more than enough liquid on their own. I actually had to add more powdered sugar than normal to get the buttercream to stiffen up to the right consistency.) My favorite part of this raspberry buttercream was the color. the buttercream sis not need any altering with food coloring as I expected, the color was beautiful just on it's own.

Both the cake and the frosting tuned out great. the frosting really made this cupcake a winner though. The raspberry tang was awesome. Next time, I think I will probably melt the chocolate down before mixing it into the cupcake batter so as to eliminate any air pockets created by the chocolate chips melting and then getting hard again during the cooling process.

Overall Rating: 4.8 out of 5
I will probably make these again and again.