L & S Cupcake Club: Marble Cupcakes

I jumped into the Cupcake Club this month, and the project met with mixed results. Without further ado, I will just launch into it!

As I said, making these was a mixed success. I was able to feed them to people, but a few things about them were odd, in part ingredients/methods I did differently, and one silly mistake that happened because I wasn't paying attention.

Cast of characters - totally channeling PW here!

I found the recipe on a blog online, and that person I think had used regular flour and made sure to sift it, so that's what I did too. As it turned out, maybe I should have invested in some cake flour, as the final texture of the cupcakes was not as moist as I'd have hoped. Live and learn I suppose!

But then again, how can you really go wrong when your recipe starts out with a nice hunk of butter and some sugar? I would say that it's pretty hard to mess it up ENTIRELY when it starts like this. :-)

Action shot - creaming the butter and sugar!

In goes the vanilla, after some eggs. 

Adding flour bit by bit.

Ok, here is one of my signs of possible um... deviation from the norm. I read a couple other posts from the club, mainly Lola's and hmb's, and when they added the cocoa to the boiling water, it did not look this dry and clumpy. I'm not sure if I used too little water, or too much chocolate, or what, but there you have it.

I did end up with something resembling chocolate batter...

I forgot to take pictures of the swirling process, but here is the result of my first little batch of cupcakes - they came out pretty well! Next comes my silly not thinking mistake...

See those cupcakes in the front? The oddly clumpy chocolate bits? This my friends is what happens when you forget to swirl the two flavors of batter together. You might wonder how this happened. Well, I blame it on my husband. It was Friday afternoon, and he got home earlier than I expected. I was happy to see him, like a little school girl. I kept baking, but I talked to him about his day, kept thinking how nice it was that he was home... and in the process forgot to swirl the flavors together in my second batch of cupakes. Ooooooh well.

So then I thought, ugh, these will probably taste fine but they aren't presentable. Combine that with the fact that the cupcakes were on the dry side, and they needed something more than the confectioner's sugar on top that the recipe called for. Luckily hubby atoned for the fact that he messed me up before (hehe) and suggested the use of leftover chocolate ganache from this cake:

Thus leading to cupcakes that looked like the one in the lower corner here:

And so the cupcakes were saved, mostly!

So, there you have it. Mixed success for my inaugural effort participating in the L & S Cupcake Club! I will take these lessons and move forward, in my quest to become an ever better baker. :-)

Actually, I have a dessert I am going to be testing this week for an upcoming event, so stay tuned for the results of that!