Wow it has been a year already?! Yes I am talking about the Cake Slice. We have spent almost a year baking our way through Vintage Cakes by Julie Richardson. This is our last cake from Vintage Cake - even though I suspect I will revisit the cookbook again in the future. ;)
For our October cake we did not vote for one but rather we all chose what we had been eyeballing to make. So you really need to check out all the CSBs yummy blogs to see what all the gals made this month.
If you are interested in joining The Cake Slice group please send an email to Paloma at love.for.coffee @ gmail.com for information. It is a great group of gals to bake with!
My pick for October is the Malted Milk Chocolate Cupcakes. My family and I like malt balls.... ok fine we love malt balls and fight over who gets to eat the last one! That in mind this was a hands down choice for me to make.
You really need to start off making the frosting because it calls for a two hour refrigeration. To make the frosting your first step is to make a malted ganache. After whisking together the cream and malt powder, heat over low heat and make sure to stir and watch it closely. Even with doing that mine started to burn before the cream was bubbling along the edges. If this happens to your pot of cream no worries, just don't scrape it out.
Simply pour the heated mixture over your chocolate and allow to sit for a few minutes before whisking until smooth and no more chocolate lumps are present.
Tip - as you can see I put mine into a glass bowl. This was just fine until I went to transfer it later to the mixing bowl - the set up mixture is very sticky and was difficult to transfer. If I had known I may have put it in my stand mixer bowl to start with. Just remember that your bowl needs to be heat proof.
Cover and refrigerate until well chilled and set up. Now time to move onto making the cupcakes.
Start off with mixing together the dry ingredients - including the malt powder. Mix this together very well to avoid lumps of the malt powder.
Next you melt the butter and chocolate until smooth. Add in the oil and then add into the dry mixture. Be sure to scrape down the sides and the bottom a couple of times. Again to avoid lumps of the malted powder.
Whisk together the milk, eggs and vanilla and slowly incorporate it into the chocolate mixture. It is a very wet batter. I usually use a scoop to fill my cupcake pans but that was just becoming a big mess all over the pan. So I decided to move the batter to a large measuring cup with a pour spout. Now filling was much easier and cleaner.
*Note - even with all the scraping and mixing there was still lumps stuck to the bowl so I would advise not scraping out the mixing bowl if you transfer like this.
These cupcakes took about 25 minutes to cook and that worried me a bit but baked up just fine.
Once the cupcakes were cooled it was time to finish the frosting. Transferred the chocolate to the stand mixer bowl and while on low added in pieces of butter. Once all the butter is added, turn the mixer up to medium to create a fluffy frosting.
It is interesting - the frosting is quite light at this point through piping it but once it was refrigerated the frosting darkens up.
Thumbs up from all that ate the cupcakes!
The cake was moist but had that nice little crunch to the top edge. The frosting was fluffy and tasty. I liked both components though I am not sure if I liked them together - maybe a little too sweet together. I might try the frosting on a dark chocolate cupcake next.
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Enjoy!
:)
