Sasha's Kitchen: Garden Party Themed Chocolate Peanut Butter Cupcakes

I had recently made a cake with all kinds of flowers in a garden party theme, and then decided to reverse it a couple weekends later into cupcakes, with pretty little flowers made using the Wilton flower tip. Flowers are just so pretty to decorate with, and this made a truly lovely batch of cupcakes. I used made a batch of chocolate peanut butter cupcakes, with my favorite peanut butter frosting. Really, there's no better flavor combination for a cake or cupcake than chocolate and peanut butter! These are perfect for a lovely summer party.

Sasha's Garden Party Chocolate Peanut Butter Cupcakes
Cupcakes (adapted from Julie Hasson)
3/4 cup flour
1/4 cup Dutch process cocoa powder
1/4 tsp Kosher salt
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup smooth lowfat peanut butter
1/4 cup butter
1 egg
1/2 tsp vanilla
2/3 cup whole milk

Mix together the dry ingredients in a bowl - the flour, cocoa powder, salt and baking powder. Beat the sugars and the butter in the  basin of a stand mixer until well combined. Then  beat in the peanut butter until smooth, followed by the egg and vanilla. Alternatively beat in the flour mixture and the milk and beat until smooth. Fill cupcake molds (lined) 3/4 of the way to the top and bake at 350 for 25 to 30 minutes until a toothpick comes out clean. Allow to cool completely before frosting.

Peanut butter frosting
2 cups confectioners' sugar
1/2 cup (one stick) unsalted butter
pinch salt
1/2 cup creamy non-fat peanut butter
2 T milk

Vanilla buttercream (for decorating)
2 cups confectioners' sugar
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter
1/2 tsp vanilla
2 T milk
gel based food coloring in pink, purple and yellow

Beat together the ingredients for the peanut butter frosting for about five minutes in your stand mixer until smooth. Frost the cupcakes using a frosting bag.

Make the regular vanilla butter cream the same way. Once you have beaten together the ingredients into a smooth frosting, divide into three bowls and color with a drop or two of the gel food coloring. Make the petals using the wilton flower tip, and use a traditional dot tip to make the dot in the center with the yellow buttercream.

Sasha's Kitchen: Garden Party Themed Chocolate Peanut Butter Cupcakes

Sasha's Kitchen: Garden Party Themed Three Tier Chocolate Cake

Most of the time, I make and decorate cupcakes instead of cakes, because cakes are just - well so big. But making cakes is so much fun for a large gathering of people, especially big and even multi tiered cakes. Last weekend, my in laws had the family over for July 4th and I decided to make a large, three layered chocolate cake with vanilla buttercream. I decorated the cake with lovely flowers of all colors on a blue background for a garden party theme. I was really pleased with the results so I thought I would share the cake and recipe here. I used Wilton cake tips to do the petals on the flowers and the leaves, as well as the vines. I got all of the supplies for the decorating at New York Cake, a fabulous baking supply store. Since I had to reuse the petal tip for the different color flowers, I found that using disposable pastry bags for the buttercream was easiest when decorating with the tips. I got the recipe for this delicious chocolate cake from the Alice's Tea Cup Cookbook, and found that their chocolate cake recipe was moist and delicious.

Chocolate Cake with Vanilla Buttercream
2 cups of sugar
1 3/4 cups of all purpose flour
3/4 cups unsweetened cocoa powder
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1 1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp kosher salt
1/4 cup sour cream
2 eggs
1 cup whole milk
1/2 cup canola oil
1 tsp vanilla extract
3/4 cup hot brewed coffe

Vanilla Buttercream (make two batches, one for the layers and covering the cake and one for decorating)
2 sticks unsalted butter
1 lb confectioner's sugar (about four cups)
2 T whole milk
1/2 tsp pure vanilla extract

To prepare the cake, preheat the oven to 350. You will need three eight inch cake pans. Next time I make this, I am going to do a second tier, whip up another batch, and also make three six inch cake plans as well for the smaller tier on top. Prepare the three eight inch cake pans and combine the fry ingredients together in a bowl (flour, cocoa, sugar, baking powder, baking soda and salt). In the basin of your stand mixer, on medium speed, beat the sour cream and eggs (one at a time), milk, oil and vanilla, and add in the dry ingredients, mixing for two minutes. Scape down the bowl and drizzle in the coffee and blend until smooth. It will be a very liquidy mixture, which is fine and appropriate.

Divide the cake batter evenly among the cake pans and bake for 20-25 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean. Allow the cakes to cool in the pans before gently removing from the pans and allowing to cool on a wire rack until room temperature.  If necessary, trim the tops of the cake to level them, but I found that this recipe did not require any leveling.

Make a first batch of buttercream by beating together those ingredients into a smooth buttercream. I added a drop of blue gel food color to get the desired color.

To build the cake, frost the three layers with buttercream and stack. Then frost the sides. I recommend using a large metal spatula to frost and to smooth the cakes so the frosting is nice and even. You can use a little metal device (no idea what its called, sorry) to make some texture on the side of the cake as well (See the photo above). You will want to get the base frosting as smooth as possible before decorating. I used blue as  for the inside as well (baby blue, actually) but you could be more traditional and use plain instead. Also, another tip - I bought a cake turntable for rotating the cake while building and decorating - it makes the entire process much easier. I got mine here in Park Slope at Tarzian West.

Make another batch of buttercream to decorate. I divided this batch into five parts and dyed with the gel food color to make orange, purple, pink, green, and yellow. The I used the Wilton flower tip to do the petals in each color, a star tip to do the yellow centers, a leaf tip for the leaves and a thin circle tip for the vines. It's cake art!

Sasha's Kitchen: Garden Party Themed Three Tier Chocolate Cake

Sasha's Kitchen: NFL Football Playoff Cupcakes

I am a much bigger baseball fan than I am a football fan. My husband and I are generally fans of the NY Giants, but we will cheer for the Jets too. Anyhow, we were invited over for dinner at some Patriots fans to watch the game tonight, and we were in charge of bringing desert. We decided to have some fun and make Jets/football themed playoff cupcakes. There's really three types here - first I made the little footballs out of fondant and added them to grass green cupcakes. Then, I made some classic Jets cupcakes, to cheer on the New York team. Finally, the last group is the football field, with all the yardlines and the field goals. They are red velvet cupcakes, and you can find my recipe on the prior link. These are the perfect treat for the big game, win or lose!

Sasha's Kitchen: NFL Football Playoff Cupcakes

Sasha's Kitchen: S-C-R-A-B-B-L-E Tile Cookies

I've long been a fan of the game Scrabble, and have played it to such a level that my family and friends often accuse my husband and I of making up words (all of which can always be found in the dictionary, I might add). I've even played versions of Scrabble (like Lexulous) on Facebook.  So, as a bit of a spoof, I decided to make royal icing cookies that looked like scrabble tiles, and taste like, well - cookies.  Part of the fun here was thinking of the words to use for the cookies.

Creating scrabble tile cookies, which are perfect for your next game night or scrabble party,  is actually quite simple.  I used the same cookie dough recipe that I used when I made purse and shoe cookies a few months ago (a project which I plan to repeat, now that my cookie-decorating skills have improved).  This is nothing fancy, just an ordinary butter cookie recipe.

Scrabble Tile Cookie Recipe


4 cups flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
3 eggs
2 tsp vanilla
2 sticks unsalted butter
2 cups sugar

Beat the butter and sugar.  Add the eggs and vanilla.  Then mix in the dry ingredients.  To make a good dough, you should do this using an artisan mixer.  You next need to chill the dough for a couple of hours before rolling out the dough.  I always used to dismiss this step, since I can be a bit lacking on the patience side.  On a prior baking adventure, I learned the hard way that this is a good step to avoid having your dough stick to the counter top when you roll it out.  You can also add some loose flour when you roll out the dough.

To make scrabble tile cookies, the process is as simple as cutting with a three-inch square shaped cookie cutter, which I bought at N.Y. Cake (my favorite baking supply store on the planet).  To frost the cookies, I used royal icing, which I was able to purchase in bag form (and just added water and a bit of food coloring).  I'm all about the do-it-from-scratch type of coking with most things, but purchasing the royal icing mix in this case just makes too much sense.

Bake the cookies on a baking sheet sprayed with PAM for about 15 to 20 minutes at 350 F,  They should come out just before the start browning.  If you wait until they are lightly browned, that is too late, as the bottoms will be slightly burnt by this point, which will impact the taste.

I frosted all of the cookies brown in various shades (I experimented with two shades of brown as you can see from the photos) using a spatula, trying to frost the royal icing as even as possible. Then, I let the icing dry for about an hour, and used a food coloring marker from my new gourmet writers set to draw the letters and point values on the tiles.

Scrabble challenge anyone?  I'd like to remind you that the word "Kitchen" is a Bingo, so that will add 50 points to my score.

Sasha's Kitchen: S-C-R-A-B-B-L-E Tile Cookies

Sasha's Kitchen: Modern Art Themed Cupcakes

In this post, I am introducing some new cupcake art - a series of cupcakes that are intended to represent the works and styles of different modern artists.

I have always enjoyed art - painting, drawing, ceramics, pottery, jewelry making etc. . .  At every point in my life, I have always been involved in some sort of artistic endeavor.  In high school, I spent much of my free time pursing my art work in my AP Art Classes.  Since then, I have always enjoyed painting with acrylics, oils and watercolors when I find the time.  Last fall, I took a pottery class, as well, which I enjoyed (though I was not an especially skilled potter - I have more luck with painting).  What I enjoy most about art is color - especially bright colors and exploring the use of color in art.  For this reason, artists who use intense colors are some of my favorite artists - from Picasso to Matisse to Kandinsky.  One of my favorite rainy day activities is spending time in art museums here in New York, and in the places that I travel to.  In New York, my favorite museums are MOMA and the Guggenheim because the focus is on post-impressionism and early modern art, showcasing some of my favorite artists.

  Piet Mondrian - Red, Blue and Yellow

I believe that food can be an art form as well.  On one hand, food is often the subject of art - for example Paul Cezanne spent the majority of his career painting fruit.  However, I believe that creating beautiful food and showcasing that food visually and photographically is an art form.  I feel the same way about writing and my approach to writing about food.

As part of my ongoing exploration of the relationship between food and art, I created a series of modern art cupcakes showcasing the paintings and styles of some of my favorite impressionist, post impressionist and modern artists: Henri Matisse, Andy Warhol, Piet Mondrian, Jackson Pollack, Claude Monet, Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Cezanne and Joan Miro.  (I love Kandinsky, Picasso, Chagall and Lichenstein too - but they didn't make it into this series).

  Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Pop Art - in Cupcake

I decorated these cupcakes using a combination of painting with rolled fondant, food colors, food coloring markers, and colored cupcake icing left over from previous cupcake recipes.  New to the mix for me were the Gourmet Writers (food markers) from New York Cake.  These were fabulous for writing on fondant - it was just like drawing with a fine-tip marker.  For the Jackson Pollack cupcake, though, I used a splatter technique and that required drizzling icing colored with food coloring using a toothpick.  For some of the cupcakes, I tried to do an entire image as a square.  Others, like the Cezanne and Monet cupcakes, I just did pieces that I thought were most distinctive of that artists (the fruit for Cezanne and the water lilies from Monet).

                        
Mondrian, plus two Matisse cut-outs - Icarus (Jazz) and another general cut-out in fondant

 Joan Miro - L'oro Dell' Azzurro

Monet's Water Lilies, Cezanne's fruit and a sideways view of Van Gogh's Starry Night (as best as I could pull it off)

Vincent Van Gogh's masterpiece starry night, turned into a cupcake

My interpretation of the Jackson Pollack splatter technique

I like to consider this my contribution to the ultimate Pop Art.  For another post exploring the relationship with food and art, check out my sushi cupcakes.

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Sasha's Kitchen: Modern Art Themed Cupcakes

Sasha's Kitchen: Sushi Cupcakes - Where Art & Food Unite

For tonight's recipe, instead of preparing something focused primarily on taste, my goal was some creative design and aesthetics.  I decided that I wanted to prepare cupcakes that had the look and feel of sushi and sushi maki rolls.  It was an attempt to artistically combine two of my favorite foods - sushi and cupcakes.  I'm not the first baker to attempt to make sushi cupcakes, but I decided to prepare sushi cupcakes using my own original design.  I prepared two types of sushi cupcakes to make my 10 piece Sushi Deluxe: a five piece maki roll (california roll) and 5 pieces of sushi on rice (salmon, tuna, tamago (egg), flying fish roe and shrimp). 

There is a line when food borders on art.  I realize tonight that I have definitely crossed that line.  Art has always been one of my passions - I took AP Art in high school and have always loved painting in acrylic, oil and watercolor - my paintings usually focus on flowers though.  Tonight, I put those painting skills to good use in painting the fish for the sushi cupcakes on rolled fondant, using an array of gel based food colors.  This is the first time I have ever used fondant, as it is more commonly used in creating ornate and elaborate wedding cakes, such as by famed wedding cake designers like Sylvia Weinstock. 

Tonight, I learned from this project that rolled fondant is an incredibly flexible and adaptable medium, which was quite easy to work with and can allow you to do almost anything when it comes to decorating baked goods.  In the future, I plan on creating a decorative cake made out of painted, rolled fondant.

Here's what you will need to make 10 piece Sushi Deluxe Cupcakes:

* 10-12 of your favorite cupcakes (I made a 1/2 batch of red velvet cupcakes, using the recipe I posted last week for Valentine's Day)

* white sprinkles (jimmies) [note - sweetened coconut would be an acceptable alternative]

* orange/red nonpareils for the flying fish roe
* rolled fondant
* gel based food colorings for painting the fondant
* watercolor paintbrushes
* foil cupcake liners
* silicon cupcake tray
* Sasha's signature frosting - click here for the frosting recipe
* optional - cupcake liners that look like sushi - I found that these were not really needed and did not use them in making this recipe

First, bake the cupcakes and allow to cool.  When the cupcakes are done baking, remove the foil liners.  Prepare the frosting, but do not color the frosting, as you are best leaving it white - the same color as rice.  Then frost the top of each of the 10 cupcakes with a spatula (my recipe made 11, but my husband ate one of them . . .)

Dip each of the cupcakes in a bowl with white jimmies.  This will resemble the sushi rice.  As a possiblke alternative, you could use sweetened coconut instead.  To make the tuna, tamago, shrimp and salmon, I rolled out a large piece of fondant using a rolling pin to the desired thickness and painted using my gel-based food colorings (which didn't require too much dilution).  I made bands out of the fondant and painted them black to resemble the seaweed.  Of these fish, I think the shrimp is my favorite.

For the flying fish roe, I added some extra frosting (about a tablespoon) in the middle of the sushi "rice" and dipped that in the red/orange nonpareils.

To make the maki roll - a california roll - I cut small squares out of the fondant, three squares for each of the five cupcakes.  I painted one green, one orange and one black.  I pressed the fondant into the cupcakes.

One of my favorite parts of this project was setting the sushi up for photographs.  My husband proposed to me several years ago, the first time we prepared homemade sushi (of the actual fish variety), so I have quite a few sushi sets we subsequently received as gifts, and used them to present the sushi photographically, with the accompanying chopsticks.

If you are interested in reading my post on how to prepare actual sushi, rather than my offbeat cupcake sushi, click here.

I really enjoyed this project immensely, in part because it was a very art intensive project that allowed me to combine my painting with my food and culinary passions.  I think these cupcakes were not as hard to make as I thought they would be, but came out exaclty as I envisioned.  I hope to do additional baking projects in the future that bring out my artistic side.  Just goes to show that food can and should be treated as an art form, just like painting or sculpture when executed properly.  In addition, I love all the bright colors and the textures of the cupcakes. 

Since starting this blog, tonight's post was one of my favorites both to execute and to write about.  I hope I made Henri Matisse, my favorite artist, proud.

Cupcake

Sasha's Kitchen: Sushi Cupcakes - Where Art & Food Unite