Disaster Cakes

It appears as though I am in a bit of a baking funk. Great timing, considering I just got this blog and all. I am determined to get out of this funk, but in the meantime, I'd like to tell you all about Disaster Cakes.

A few weeks ago, we went out for one of my roommate's birthdays at Dinosaur BBQ in Harlem. As we were wrapping up dinner, we decided we needed to walk up to Fairway to digest a little before walking home and sitting on our butts like the fat loads we felt like (post-Dino fatness is the best of all fatnesses). Since we were going to the supermarket, my roomies asked what cupcakes would I be buying ingredients for. Homemade Hostess Cupcakes, I declared. I knew I had a recipe in my Martha Stewart Cupcakes book, and I was ready to try it.

(Source: Martha Stewart)

Everyone got instantly excited. I pulled the recipe up on my phone and quickly saw that it only made 12 cupcakes. I would double it! But wow, that seemed like a lot of butter and Marshmallow Fluff for 24 cupcakes. That's because the recipe made 12 jumbo cupcakes, which translates to 24 regular cupcakes. I now had the ingredients to make 48 Homemade Hostess Cupcakes. I have a class of 18 and a friend's birthday coming up... no problem! I soon realized I wanted nothing to do with more than 24 of these cupcakes.

Many things went wrong yesterday. First of all, let's talk about the definition of "room temperature." The Internet defines room temperature as between 65 and 75 degrees Fahrenheit (roughly). When it is 95 degrees outside and you are in an unairconditioned and poorly ventilated room, your room's temperature is going to be a little warmer. Add a 350 degree oven and a cook running around like a chicken with her head cut off to that, and you're basically cooking outside in the New York City summer. My tiny hurricane fan couldn't keep up! I blame the temperature for the majority of things that happened with these cupcakes.

The rest of the things that went wrong were totally my fault. I thought I knew more than Martha. Cooking Rule #346: You NEVER know more than Martha! There was a reason these cupcakes were supposed to be jumbo. There was a reason these cupcakes were unlined and the pans greased a certain way. And there was a reason she outlined a ridiculously detailed method of filling these cupcakes. I'm sorry I doubted you, Martha. My laziness will be my demise.

Let's get right to it. For the complete, accurate, uninterrupted recipe, check out Martha's website.

Jumbo Cream-Filled Chocolate Cupcakes (from Martha Stewart's Cupcakes)

Ingredients

• 1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, room temperature, plus more for tins
• 3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder, plus more for tins
• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 2 cups sugar
• 3 large eggs, room temperature
• 1 cup sour cream, room temperature

Directions

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Brush tins with butter; dust with cocoa powder, tapping out excess.

Here's where I thought I knew more than Martha. Brushing the tins and dusting with cocoa took forever, dyed my finger brown, and honestly didn't look to be creating a really great protective coating. For my second muffin tin, I sprayed liberally with nonstick cooking spray. It would be an experiment. Which would work better?

Whisk together flour, cocoa, baking soda, baking powder, and salt. Set aside.

With an electric mixer, cream butter and sugar until pale and fluffy. Add eggs one at a time, beating until each is incorporated, scraping down sides of bowl as needed.

With the exception of creaming butter & sugar together, I mix all of my cakes by hand. Always.

Add flour mixture in two batches, alternating with the sour cream, and mixing until just incorporated after each.

My batter was super lumpy, so I broke my own rule and gave it a little spin with my hand mixer.

Divide batter evenly among prepared cups, filling each with about 1/4 cup (1/2 cup if you're making jumbo cakes).

Bake, rotating tins halfway through, until a cake tester inserted in centers comes out clean, about 20 minutes. Cool in tins 5 minutes, then run a small knife around the edges to loosen; turn out cupcakes onto racks and let cool completely.

Remember when I said I don't have cooling racks or a cupcake carrier? Well, I bought a carrier, but not racks... so I used my carrier as a cooling rack! It worked a lot better and took up a lot less space than the plates I had been using.

I bet you're dying to know the results of the experiment. Just kidding, you totally already know. Martha was right, and I was wrong.

The actual cakes weren't a total disaster. It was the Marshmallow Cream Filling that did me in.

Ingredients

• 1 1/2 cups marshmallow cream, such as Marshmallow Fluff
• 1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, cut into pieces, room temperature

Directions

Whisk marshmallow cream and butter until smooth. Cover with plastic wrap and chill until slightly firm, 15 to 30 minutes, before using.

I should have chilled for longer. I should have stopped filling halfway through and re-chilled. It was too damn hot in my kitchen, and the runny Fluff filling got everywhere. Fluff on the table. Fluff on the floor. Fluff clogging my drain. Fluff on my brand new apron. Somehow, someway, Fluff on my cabinets?

I did not follow Martha's filling directions at all. At this point, I was frustrated and my kitchen was a disaster. It was hot, and I was tired. I put my Fluff in a piping bag with a filling tip, poked a hole in the top of the cake, and filled until it oozed out. The cakes were already ugly - they were all short, some were burnt, and half were missing chunks out of the bottom. I no longer cared. I had accepted Disaster Cakes for what they are - a delicious mess.

I brought them to class that night, and they were a big hit. I apologized a million times, but no one seemed to care that they were hideous. One of my classmates, a far more experienced baker than I, talked me though my disaster and advised me to chalk it up to the temperature and move on. I will not be making these again - at least not without jumbo tins and the proper filling technique. Instead, I'm going to find something else to do with the leftover Fluff and sour cream, although I'm not quite sure what that is...

So what have we learned?

1. Don't bake at noon in the summer in your unairconditioned dorm.
2. Marshmallow Fluff was created by the devil to destroy your kitchen.
3. Nobody cares how things look as long as they taste good.
4. I do not know more about cupcakes than Martha Stewart.

What was your biggest baking disaster?

The City Bakery (Union Square)

It's my first ever bakery review, and I think I picked a winner! My friend Meredith & I were shopping in Union Square and decided we needed some sugar. Google Maps and Yelp pointed me to the same place. Allow me to introduce you to The City Bakery, located on 18th Street & 5th Avenue.

(Source: Glenwood)

Currently celebrating its 20th anniversary, City Bakery prides itself in creating seasonal menus using organic and locally-grown ingredients found in the nearby Union Square Farmer's Market. It's a beautiful, open space with a loft for additional seating and something called "The Chocolate Room." While the bakery serves real food too (their mac & cheese looked pretty killer), we came for the sweets.

I ordered exactly what the good people of Yelp told me to order - the famous hot chocolate and the Pretzel Croissant. It's hard to put the flavor of the croissant into words. It was sweet yet salty, flaky on the outside yet doughy on the inside. It was the perfect balance of flavors, but it became nothing short of magical once I dipped it into the hot chocolate.

City Bakery's hot chocolate is not your average cuppa. It's thicker than most beverages, and much, much richer. It is basically like drinking melted milk chocolate. When I dunked the pretzel croissant into the chocolate, it draped over it perfectly. Pure bliss. They even have an annual hot chocolate festival with a bunch of different flavors. I want to go to there!

(Source: The NYC Big Adventure)

My nompanion got the Chocolate White Chocolate Cookie, and the hot chocolate, of course. The cookie was the perfect consistency - chewy and moist on the inside with a bit of bite to the outside. Again, dipping it in the hot chocolate made it even better. But, at least from the bite I had, the cookie wasn't really anything too special. Don't get me wrong, it was delicious! But it was just like any other well-made chocolate white chocolate chip cookie that you can get in one of the dozens of other bakeries in NYC.

City Bakery offered a vegan chocolate chip cookie, which I'd love to try. Vegan cookies are hard to do well, and I wonder how theirs compares. They also had this gigantic muffin (you can see it in the second picture above) that looked pretty amazing. Did I mention non-alcoholic homemade sangria? Yum. I've got to try that.

Overall, City Bakery was a spacious, bright location for a shopping day snack. Their "real" food seemed a bit pricey, but the baked goods were pretty standardly priced. My only complaint was that there wasn't really a menu. It made it difficult to know what drinks we could order, and what options we had with those drinks. Don't get me wrong, I didn't really want anything but the hot chocolate. But I hear they make homemade marshmallows too, and I didn't see that posted anywhere and, therefore, forgot to order it. That being said, I will gladly return to City Bakery if I'm in the area and/or if I'm craving that amazing pretzel croissant.

The City Bakery in Union Square gets my stamp of approval!

Have you been to City Bakery? Are you a firm believer that the best hot chocolate in New York City is served elsewhere? Do you have ideas on where I should have gone instead or where I should go next? 

Sound off in the comments!

Fresh Outta The Oven

Hello out there! Welcome to Cake Walk and Coffee Talk! Some of you may know me from my personal blog, Concrete Jane, and those of you that do can attest to the delicious goodies that I bake up whenever I'm bored and/or stressed. I've even taken to baking when I'm in a good mood (gasp!). What can I say? Baking calms me down. There's something wonderful about knowing that no matter what is going on in the outside world, I know that I can cream together butter and sugar, add in some eggs, flour, leaveners, and flavorings, and something yummy will absolutely emerge.

I live in New York City, home to about a billion cafes. Did you know you could eat at a different restaurant for breakfast, lunch and dinner in NYC for fifteen years without having to go back to the same place twice? It's ridiculous! While I do enjoy making my own goodies at home, I have to say I've become quite the taste-tester. I love wandering around the city and trying out different bakeries, trying to determine which one makes the ultimate red velvet cupcake or peanut butter cookies. And then, of course, I love coming home and trying to top that.

Because I live in New York City on a grad student budget, I do not have the luxurious kitchen I once had (I use the term luxurious loosely; what people outside the city consider normal, people inside the city consider spacious and extravagant). The vast majority of my baked goods are created in my tiny dorm kitchen, baked in my tiny dorm oven, and stored in my tiny dorm cabinets, on my tiny dorm kitchen table, or in my tiny regular sized dorm fridge until I have successfully fattened up everyone around me. I don't have a stand mixer. I don't have a cake carrier. I don't even have cooling racks. But I make it work, somehow, deliciously.

So join me on my cake walk. Sit down for some coffee talk (because really, what is coffee without something sweet to enjoy with it?). I'm always up for an adventure, and I'm determined to make baking my speciality!