Champagne & Strawberry Cupcakes

I have to admit, I’m in love with Cupcake Wars.  I am fascinated watching shows like that and Chopped on Food Network, because I think it’s so neat watching people come up with recipes on the fly, with all these interesting flavor combinations!  This past week I was watching with my parents while home for Easter, and the episode had several people using red wine in cupcakes.  This, of course, intrigued me, and I immediately starting looking up wine cake recipes.  Unfortunately, it seems that the chocolate-red wine combinations has the chance to make a dry, very dense cake, and all the white wine cake recipes I found started with boxed mix (um, no – to me, that’s not really a recipe!).

 

After searching around for a bit, I randomly found a champagne cake recipe, and decided to give it a whirl.  For these cupcakes, I made a champagne cupcake batter, a very light strawberry and champagne cream filling, and a champagne buttercream. Continue reading

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Sunrise Cake – Orange Chiffon Cake with Strawberry Whipped Cream

As part of my new goal to start baking once a week for this blog (since my baking classes are officially over), I decided to try making a cake that fits with one of my favorite flavor combinations – orange and strawberry.  I love making orange and strawberry smoothies, I love eating the orange and strawberry Skittles together, and now I’m trying to make it work with a cake!

For this cake, it’s not really orange and strawberry cake per se, but an orange cake with strawberry whipped cream.  Sitting here writing this while the cake is baking, I really hope that the flavors compliment each other, and that one doesn’t overpower the other.  The components both smell absolutely delicious, so here’s hoping! Continue reading

Plated Dessert – Strawberry Daiquiri

 

For my final in my Baking & Pastry III class, we had to do a “mystery basket” kind of thing – basically we had to incorporate cake, fruit and a sauce into a dessert.  One of my immediate thoughts (after a recent episode of “Cupcake Wars”), was to do a deconstructed drink (either that or a red velvet cake).

I thought through my dessert a lot, and after my first day of my final, I had to start over on my cake – I tried to make my first cake strawberry red, and it ended up being a kind of day-glo red/pink.  Very non-appetizing.  But once I remade the cake, the dessert came together perfectly. Continue reading