la belle patisserie: White Chocolate Mocha Cupcakes

As soon as I claimed my mixer on Friday afternoon I decided it had to be used immediately. I was actually planning on making cupcakes, so it was pretty much an added bonus I finally had a stand mixer instead of my hand-held mixer that I don't like very much because it is just too fast. Anyway, I have been wanting to attempt this recipe for a while now. I didn't really find it from anywhere so I had to scour websites, blogs and cookbooks to find an acceptable recipe for both the cupcakes and the frosting. One of the main problems I had was I wanted to use melted chocolate (a mixture of bittersweet and semisweet) and all the recipes I was finding called for unsweetened cocoa powder. And then I remember I am a baking student with a big fat text book, and voila, I had a recipe.

Since I pulled a recipe from my textbook, I need to weigh the ingredients instead of measuring.

Getting ready to scale out ingredients

Weighing the butter

The recipe I used was for a basic chocolate butter cake, but I took some liberties here and there. I really wanted a cake with a strong coffee flavor, not a chocolate cake with a hint of coffee. The formula called for 14 oz. of milk, so I substituted 7 oz. of milk and 7 oz. of cold coffee. The flavor worked out well, but I think I need to increase the amount of chemical leaveners I use next time.

Coffee & Milk mixture

My machine, hard at work, creaming butter...

And my beautiful batter...

This formula yielded approximately 36 cupcakes. They were on the smaller side and they didn't rise very well, but I suspect that is because of the proportion of coffee vs. the proportion of baking powder. And since I totally altered the recipe in a somewhat major way, I really wasn't expecting perfection in the presentation the first go at it.

Cupcakes cooling...boy, those look good

Next up, I had to prepare the white chocolate buttercream. For the frosting, I found a recipe online so I turned out quite nice.

I usually like to ice with a large star tip, but typically I think it leaves the cupcakes with a little too much frosting, plus since my formula gave me 36 cupcakes, I wasn't really sure if I would have enough frosting. Instead of a large star tip, I used a #12 round tip. They still looked pretty and I had just enough frosting.

Frosting the cupcakes

The finished product looked nice and tasted wonderful. I think the flavor balanced out nicely, but the frosting could of had a little more chocolaty flavor.