Bake-A-Long #11 - Yellow Butter Cupcakes with Chocolate Egg White Buttercream

This week was free choice week for the Heavenly Cake Bakers group. That means we could bake whatever Heavenly Cake recipe we wanted that had already been baked but we missed out on. I chose the yellow butter cupcakes with chocolate egg white buttercream. I actually baked these guys a few weeks ago to bring to "Game Night" at a friends house. They were a hit.

I used Greek style yogurt in the batter. I love this stuff. It is the creamiest, richest yogurt out there. I buy the full fat version, but it is available in reduced fat as well. If you haven't tried it, do it. I use the plain, unsweetened kind and add honey or preserves to sweeten it when I want to eat it plain, and use it to cook with as well. I actually read in Cook's Illustrated the other day that to use it as a replacement for regular yogurt in recipes, use 2/3 of the Greek yogurt and 1/3 part milk to account for the additional fat and lower water content in the Greek versus traditional yogurt. They said that in their tests, when a 1:1 substitution was used, their cakes came out drier. I will try this next time, but I did not have a problem with dryness in this cupcake recipe. The texture was great. Plenty moist.

I didn't take any pictures of the buttercream making process. I was too busy fretting over it. This was only the second or third time that I have made a real buttercream. I get nervous every time because I actually threw away my first buttercream attempt a few years ago because I didn't think it would ever come together. I then learned that if I would have just kept on mixing, it probably would have been fine. So, that's my advice for making buttercream: keep mixing. It may look like a curdled mess, but most likely it will come together. That's what this chocolate buttercream did as well, it looked horrible and then magically it emulsifies into a beautiful tasty frosting. Everyone loved the flavor as well.

These cupcakes + chocolate buttercream will be made again. I made 12 regular sized and 6-8 minis (I cannot remember exactly how many I yielded). The minis went fast. As soon as someone ate one, they wanted another. I think this is my favorite yellow cake recipe so far.

Bake-A-Long #10 - True Orange Genoise (Attempt)

OK. I'll start out by telling you that this cake was a flop. The curd and ganache turned out great, but I think I win the award for shortest genoise (more about that later).

For the curd, I used the poor neglected Florida sour orange. You can find these trees growing wild in various places around the state. They are pretty much good trees turned sour. The fruit made a wonderful curd and my mother-in-law also makes an awesome sour orange pie with them (think key lime pie but with sour oranges).

Now for the cake. The batter started out fine. My eggs whipped up nicely. I mixed them for the minimum 5 minutes but they appeared quadrupled in volume. The batter really started to fall when I put in the butter/egg mixture. I knew once I put it in the pan something wasn't right. But, I thought maybe I'd get lucky and it would rise more in the oven.

No such luck.

Well, I wasn't going to attempt to cut a 1/2 inch cake in half. So, I had this grand idea of slicing it down the middle to make it look like an orange slice once finished. Ha.

Unfrosted it looked more like a grilled cheese.

I syruped it up, frosted and "decorated" with curd. Not my most beautiful cake ever.

Despite the fact that this was the densest, chewiest cake I have ever made, it still was not bad. If I do attempt to make it again, I might stay away from the genoise and make a butter cake instead.