high-bar baking

It’s not related to chocolate cupcakes, but the Oscars were on tonight, which means I was thinking about Christopher Nolan and Oppenheimer. What would it be like, to be that world class at something? 

Rome wasn’t built in a day. But it was built one day at a time. 

To accompany said Oscars party, I made a very throwback Sarah Kieffer recipe for “our favorite chocolate cupcakes” (I suppose it’s adapted from Orangette, she attributes it). I can’t say I needed 33 cupcakes. But can I say that I didn’t need 33 cupcakes? The recipes makes many cupcakes, just be prepared for that. It’s a buttermilk-and-oil chocolate cake, which is one of the only form factors worth bothering with. Sorry, butter. We love you everywhere else. But unless we’re making my Monogamy Chocolate Cake (a story for another time), a chocolate cake needs the liquid-fat security of oil. These didn’t disappoint. Deeply dark, moist as all get out, excellent crumb. The kind of cupcake that leaves you looking around like, “Where did the other three cupcakes go? That couldn’t have been me, right?”

Salt Lake got in the way a little bit, especially with my inferior muffin tin. My Wilton one allowed a little bit of collapse in the center, but my cheaper (so cheap it doesn’t even have a brand stamped on it) one had a fair amount of collapse. It has a lid, ok? Transporting cupcakes is hard; I can’t get rid of a tin that has its own lid! 

So, in the future I’ll be reducing the leavening a bit to correct for that. I usually cut the predominant leavener (here it’s the baking soda) by half and see where that gets me. 

Apologies for the recipe not being in grams. I suppose we just all have to spend an afternoon finally justifying the age-old child question, “Why do we even have to learn this math?!” and converting the volumes to weights. 

For this one, knowing how Sarah weighs out her other recipes, I used:

142 g = 1 cup of flour

240 g = 1 liquid cup of everything

80 g = 1 cup of cocoa powder

200 g = 1 cup of sugar

The frosting is her Amaretto Buttercream, frozen from a couple of weeks ago and re-used today. I tried to whip it into shape by hand, but my whisk was hot out of the dishwasher and the frosting got a little curdled. Thanks to the lovely folks at Serious Eats, I knew how to rescue the buttercream (yes, I had to do it the first time too, don’t judge me) — here, it was already warm, so I just whipped it to death in my stand mixer for a couple of minutes and it came back together like a dream. I love when a good frosting makes me look way more pro than I actually am.