With a Cherry on Top

There's some crucial information you need to know about me before hearing about the cupcakes I baked yesterday:

First of all, I love "fake" food. Love probably does not even begin to describe how much I enjoy it. The one food I could eat for every meal, every single day, for the rest of my life is Kraft macaroni & cheese. Kraft probably would have sponsored me as a young child if they knew how much mac & cheese I would go on to consume. Despite this, when I bake, I use only "real" ingredients and the highest quality of them I can find.

Second, in line with my first point, maraschino cherries are my favorite fruit. In fact, there was a time in my life where they were the only "fruit" I would eat. Probably one of the things that made me most sad about growing up was losing the ability to order Shirley Temples at restaurants without looking ridiculous. Not that that's stopped me from doing so; I usually just blush the color of the drink when ordering them.

Chopped maraschino cherries for batter

Third, illustrations of cupcakes with cherries are a personal pet peeve of mine. When I was commissioning my logo, one of my few criteria was that the image of the cupcake did not have a cherry on it. Realistically, how often do you see cupcakes with a cherry on them?

After racking my brain and the internet for a new cupcake flavor to bring to work, I settled on cherry vanilla. Almost all the recipes I found had real cherries in them, and I did contemplate using them, but I knew I'd be happier with maraschino cherries (although I did fear my coworkers would shun these cupcakes). I had also brought back some vanilla bean paste from a vineyard I went to in New Zealand, and was excited to try that out in the frosting. Unable to find a recipe I thought would work, I just put together one of my own.

After work, I picked up two different types of maraschino cherries - with stems and without. The cutting of the cherries left my fingertips stained deep red from the food dye. This reminded me of how my childhood best friend was not allowed to eat certain red dyes because her mother forbade her. Maraschino cherries were on that family's list of forbidden foods. After chopping all the cherries, I tossed them in to the batter and added a few drops of red dye for good measure, just to be safe. I didn't want any repeat grey cupcakes (see this post if you don't know what I'm talking about).

Cupcake briefcase I take to work

I know I said the other day that cookie dough is my favorite, but it has been replaced (or at least tied) with these cupcakes. I ate an embarrassing amount of them. Really, embarrassing. I'm usually pretty uninterested in the cupcakes I bake because once I'm done with all the effort, I'm too "over" them to eat them. These cupcakes also survived the monsoon we are having in NYC (and I didn't have an umbrella this morning) and made it into work, relatively dry. They definitely were appreciated though...they unanimously got my coworkers' seal of approval.

A Retry of the Blood Orange Cupcakes

I was so bummed all day about last night's cupcakes. Despite my best googling efforts, I was unable to find anyone that has ever had the similar problem with a beige batter inexplicably turning blue-grey in the oven. My first efforts to blog about my baking were just sadly lacking, and it was almost an embarrassment being as I consider myself a better baker than producing moldy-looking cupcakes. So tonight I was determined to avenge these baking mishaps by straightening out the blood orange cake recipe.

My dad was in town for the night because he's working in my neighborhood these past few days, and after meeting him for a drink after work, I took him to Garden of Eden, one of my favorite places in Hoboken and also the best place to find exotic fruits and vegetables. I picked up a few more blood oranges, and we perused the wide array of produce. There are a lot of great cupcakes to be imagined out of all those different fruits.

My first change in the recipe was instead of adding the orange juice directly to the milk, I first added additional sugar and reduced it down to a syrup on low heat on the stove. I think the original recipe was too wet, and this helped cut some of that, plus add some sugar that was lacking in the original. Once this syrup cooled, I added it to the milk to comprise the wet ingredients. Other than that, the only change I made was to add some red and orange gel food color to the batter before the egg whites as a preventative measure against the grey. I would have preferred just the natural ingredients, but I wasn't about to serve a something that looked so awful (except to my coworker Kara today, but I gave her fair warning it wasn't supposed to look like that). The end result was a much, much better cupcake. Not only was the color much improved, but the orange taste was more pronounced and less bland.

These cupcakes are making the trek into the city with me tomorrow for work. I get some really weird looks when I walk onto my bus with my cupcake carrier. One girl in the streets of NYC followed me down a block yelling at my back "YO! Can I have some cupcakes?!?!" last time I brought cupcakes to work. Let's hope tomorrow's transport doesn't provoke that sort of anxiety again.

Wooooo...Finally a success!