Chocolate Orange Cupcakes

This blog hasn't been updated since well before the holidays, so I wanted to come back in with a bang. Warning: this post is a lot of going on about subtle tricks and tips, so it's a longer one. Still, if you really are looking for some good tips, hopefully this can help.

For the cake recipe, I half this 1-2-3-4 recipe of Paula Deen's, which I've used before. When I make cupcakes I usually use a box cake mix, because they taste just as good and are easier to handle. This is a good, easy cake mix, though, that I'd recommend to any beginners.

A quick word on "creaming butter and sugar." You will see this in many baking recipes. Something I've learned from my own experience is that you need to make sure you beat the butter for long enough. If you have enough butter (1 cup+) you can beat butter own its own. Most recipes, though, will call for you to beat sugar or powdered sugar or something similar with it. If it's less than a cup, like 1/2 cup (1 stick) I used for this recipe, it's helpful to add the sugar so there's something there to actually mix. In any event, make sure you beat the butter mixture for several minutes. Down below is a picture of my butter-sugar mixture after I beat it for 1 minute:

 And here it is after I beat it for a full 6 minutes:

You can (hopefully) see the difference in how fluffy it is. The air in your batter will make a big difference for many recipes. You can tell when the mixture has doubled (or more) in size. Sometimes I'll be mixing mixing mixing and look down and, "Oh! That definitely fluffed up." You can't over cream butter, so if you're not sure, just add a few more minutes to be safe.

One thing I've started doing is putting batter or frosting into ziploc bags and using them as piping bags. Since I was making cupcakes, and not a round or sheet cake, this was a handy and much cleaner to portion the batter into the baking cups. Simply snip a corner off and you can push the dough/frosting/whatever out. So easy and nice!

For my frosting recipe, I had to improvise. In the modern days of cooking with online recipes, I can be difficult to find the right recipe.

A really easy job of this is to find a highly rated recipe online. Look for recipes with five stars and a lot of ratings (in the hundreds). However, sometimes you can't find a recipe you want that has five stars and a lot of ratings, like with my orange frosting recipe search, and you have to decide to ditch it or fix it.

It's always a good idea to read the reviews recipes get. Even highly rated recipes have problems that get mentioned in the reviews. You'll find that some things people had a "problem" with (i.e. "I didn't like the nuts in this recipe," "This recipe didn't make as much as I wanted," "This recipe wasn't what I expected") are not things that would be problems to you. Other times there might be problems that you just need to be aware of or that you might want to change.

For example, I finally decided on this orange frosting recipe. The recipe only has three reviews (a minuscule number), but it used all the ingredients I had (i.e. butter and not cream cheese) when I had limited ingredients to work with. The two complaints in the reviews were that the flavor wasn't strong, and that the frosting wasn't thick enough.

Also remember to take reviews with a grain of salt, but to keep them in mind.

After looking at other recipes and deciding that this one was still the best suited to my ingredients, I decided to go ahead with this recipe. As I made it I paid attention to the problems that might come up (I wouldn't recommend changing a baking recipe before you make it as written in case it turns out okay in the first place). While I didn't want an overly strong orange flavor in the first place, I did end up adding a teaspoon of orange peel and 2 additional tablespoons of butter. The flavor was good, and not overpowering or artificial, and the frosting was so thick that it peaked like beaten egg whites.

Here's the modified recipe I ended up with:
5 Tb Butter (added 2 Tb from original recipe)
3 3/4 C Powdered sugar
5 Tb Orange Juice
2 1/2 t. Orange peel (added 1 t. from original recipe)
2-3 Shakes of salt

The frosting turned out pretty well. I put it in a ziploc bag (just like my cake batter) in the fridge while the rest of my cupcakes finished baking. I'm notorious for frosting things before they cool, but I've found that refrigerating frosting while everything else bakes will help it to thicken even more and be easier to work with.

My orange zesting set up:

 Cupcakes fresh out of the oven (I over baked this batch by about 2 minutes):

 Piping in the second batch of cupcakes:

 This is the frosting after I added the orange and salt and beat it for an additional 3 or 4 minutes:

 You can see how thick it is:

 Aaaand this finished product (I also piped the frosting on with a ziploc):

 

A few last notes on polishing up your cupcakes:

Keep it in mind that you may not always have enough frosting to frost all the cupcakes your cake recipe makes. I usually frost my best cupcakes first, going down in quality, so that all the best cupcakes were frosted.

If you want to add some kind of garnish on the top, just be mindful of the effect it will have on the overall cupcake. I considered adding chocolate flakes to the tops of these cupcakes, but decided against it since there was already a lot of chocolate in the batter. I also considered more orange zest, but decided against that because peel tends to bleed over time and can look strange after a day or two. Always experiment, though, and do whatever you think is fun.