Having been bitten by the cupcake bug, there was just no stopping! My mind went into overdrive thinking of all the possible flavour combinations and I would have done a batch of every that crept into my mind, if not for mum saying that it's perhaps time for the oven to take a little break...
So before going on some sort of a cupcake hiatus, I decided to add two more flavours. Instead of the unconventional, I went down the tried and tested route by sticking to two common and pretty well liked flavours - Peanut Butter and Cookie Crumble.
The cupcake bases were the same chocolate ones as the ones in the previous cupcake post, that I had developed a liking to. They were just so moist even after spending hours in the fridge! It was abit of a challenge to get them into the oven quick enough though as they tend to not get maximum rise if the batter is left sitting around.
For the peanut butter ones, I kinda went to town with the peanut butter when I was mixing it into the Swiss Meringue Buttercream (SMBC) and it went all sloppy and soft - definitely not pipable and not what I was after! Luckily I had used only about a quarter of the stock SMBC I had made earlier, for the trial PB cream so I grabbed another quarter of plain SMBC and added the PB little by little this time to get the right consistency and taste.
It was almost like doing a titration (pardon the geeky reference..guess I can't suppress the chemist in me!) with the PB addition into the cream but after adding about a quarter cup of the creamy heavenly stuff that we so casually refer to as PB, I decided to stop. It was still pipable but I sensed it was at that cliffhanger point (you can see from the picture that the cream was pretty soft and perhaps the swirl wasn't the best choice of pattern to pipe in this case!) where anymore PB would tip it over the edge into unpipable stuff. The colour wasn't deep though, so I had to rummage through the fridge for that bottle of brown powder colouring...a sprinkle or two of that stuff and I was ready to pipe!
The Cookie Crumble cupcake had me stumped for a bit as I wondered how I was to achieve that taste that we've gotten so used to whenever someone mentions Cookies n' Cream. I knew I had to start with Oreos for sure, so I crushed a couple of them and added them to some plain SMBC. But I soon realised that it wasn't giving me that flavour I was looking for...that had me clutching at straws for quite a while until I decided to add in a little of the Oreo cream that I had scraped off the biscuits prior to crushing them.
Adding the cream really hit the spot for me flavour wise and I was happy to be able to add another 2 tantalizing and tempting flavours!
Till next time! The cupcake journey plods on!
No comments:
Post a Comment