The cupcake craze is still in full swing in Palo Alto, where we can choose from Sprinkle’s or Kara’s Cupcakes (which originated in San Francisco).  I’ve been pleasantly surprised with the quality of the cake from Sprinkle’s on the couple of time I’ve tasted them.  I finally decided to try out Kara’s a couple weekends ago — after hiking up Half Dome the day before, I felt like I could afford a little treat.  While picking a cupcake may sometimes be a difficult decision, this time it was easy.  Fleur de Sel cupcake — “chocolate cupcake with caramel filling, ganache frosting and fleur de sel.”  Killer combination!  And while it was indeed a wonderful melding of flavors, with the sweet caramel, the rich chocolate, and the salt to cut through it all, the cake itself was disappointingly dry.  Honestly, I felt like I could do better.  So, the next weekend, if I do say so myself, I did.

I made the devil’s food cake recipe my grandmother used to use, adding a bit of extra chocolate, and topped it with a very dark chocolatey buttercream adapted from Mark Bittman.  I based the caramel on a recipe from — you guessed it! — Smitten Kitchen.  This was definitely the best caramel I have ever made in terms of cooking it the right amount of time (a feat I’m sure I will never repeat), but it was a bit runny for the filling, so I need to work on that.  Despite being a bit messy from the runny caramel, the flavor of these cupcakes was a hit, and I’m sure I’ll be making them again.

And finally, a word of warning. If you have extra chocolate frosting and caramel filling at the end, by no means should you alternate dipping a (clean) finger in each one and licking it off until you run out of fingers. If you start doing that, you may never stop. Not that I would know.

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I am always inspired by the beautiful desserts at La Tartine Gourmande, so when we decided to cook dinner for my in-laws for Mother’s Day, I finally got around to making these rhubarb tartlets that have been on my list for ages.  If you use ready-made puff pastry, as I did, they come together very quickly, but make for quite an elegant presentation.  The almond-brown sugar crumble underneath gets a nice bite from freshly grated ginger, which I love with the tartness of the rhubarb.
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For Mom’s birthday, I gave her a list of options of “celebration desserts” I’d been wanting to try, and she picked the hazelnut brown butter cake from Smitten Kitchen.  (I know, you’re probably starting to think that’s the only place I ever get ideas.  Maybe I have a little food crush?  I actually found this one via Not Derby Pie though.)  This cake was fantastic — nutty, dense and almost chewy but not too heavy, just sweet and rich enough.  I have to admit, I was worried this wasn’t going to be chocolatey enough for a birthday cake for Mom. (A couple years ago I made this torte, which is basically just chocolate, butter, and cream.  We could barely stick in the candles.)  But here, the layer of ganache, while thin, was dark and rich enough that it was just perfect.  And wait until you see what I did with the leftover hazelnuts, coming later this week!

I made caramelized hazelnuts to decorate the top, using instructions from Tartelette.  However, I thought some pictures were in order to better illustrate the technique, so I’ve detailed what I did after the jump.  If you want the recipe for the cake, I’ll send you over to the Smitten Kitchen.  By the way, the cake has very little flour in it, so I think it could probably be made gluten free pretty easily.

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For this month’s Daring Baker’s post, the theme was cheesecake, and we could modify the basic recipe as much as we wanted.  Oh, the freedom!  I wanted to make something special for Easter, after having given up sweets for Lent, and I found this brownie mosaic cheesecake from Smitten Kitchen — regular cheesecake with chunks of brownies mixed in, and a chocolate graham cracker crust.  I planned to use the base recipe from Abbey’s Infamous Cheesecake, chosen by Jenny Bakes, our host this month, but mix in some matcha green tea powder, which I’ve been wanting to try, and chunks of brownies as in Deb’s version.  I ended up using a base recipe more like Deb’s — when I got ready to make the cheesecake, I realized I’d forgotten to buy heavy cream, but if you want to try Abbey’s cheesecake, you can get that version from Jenny’s site.

Matcha is a very finely ground ground green tea used in the Japanese tea ceremony.  Lately, it’s been popular in baked goods for its vibrant green color.  As it turns out though, it’s incredibly expensive (if anyone knows a cheaper place to buy matcha online, please let us know in the comments!).  Instead, I ended up buying Double Green Matcha Tea from the Republic of Tea.  It’s in individual tea bags and is a combination of matcha tea and regular green tea.  I then ground it up more finely in our coffee grinder, but I still couldn’t get it as fine as real matcha, which I think is why the final cheesecake has visible flecks of tea in it and is only slightly green.  The tea only subtly flavors the cheesecake, but I think the bitter note helps to cut the richness of the cheesecake, and I really liked the addition.  For the brownies, I just used a mix, since they were only a small part of the final product, I didn’t think it was worth making them from scratch.

And finally, thanks of course to Jenny for hosting, and be sure to visit the blogroll on the new Daring Bakers’ site, to see what everyone else whipped up!

The April 2009 challenge is hosted by Jenny from Jenny Bakes. She has chosen Abbey’s Infamous Cheesecake as the challenge.

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Well, I’m a day late and a dollar short, but here’s my best effort at this month’s challenge.  Wendy at wmplesblog and Dharm at Dad – Baker and Chef hosted this month’s challenge, the Chocolate Valentino from Chef Wan.  This was an unusually simple challenge with only three ingredients — eggs, butter, and chocolate.  It makes a dense, fudgy, brownie-like but crumbly, rich cake, and as we were warned, it tastes just like the chocolate you use to make it.  We were also supposed to make homemade ice cream to go with the cake, and I had it all planned out to make this almond cherry chocolate ice cream.  I had bought the ingredients and everything, but I ended up at work all day on Valentine’s Day, and I had time to make the cake but not the ice cream.  In the end, it was so rich on its own, I don’t think it suffered too much from not having ice cream to go with it, although I do still want to try that ice cream sometime.

I added a couple extra ingredients to my cake — flaky sea salt and Kahlua.  I thought the coffee flavoring would be tasty with the chocolate, although if I did it again I’d either add more or leave it out, as I couldn’t really taste it. However, I did think the salt really added to the flavor of the cake. (After discovering World Peace Cookies, I’m pretty much in love with the salty-sweet combination.)

Thanks to Wendy and Dharm for a delicious Valentine’s day treat!  Finally, here’s the fine print for the blog-checkers:

The February 2009 challenge is hosted by Wendy of WMPE’s blog and Dharm of Dad ~ Baker & Chef.
We have chosen a Chocolate Valentino cake by Chef Wan; a Vanilla Ice Cream recipe from Dharm and a Vanilla Ice Cream recipe from Wendy as the challenge.

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