Double Chocolate

Have you ever wonder if your store bought chocolate cake a real chocolate cake?  Or is it cocoa cake? Quite a lot of chocolate cake recipes I found calls for mainly cocoa powder, and I always find them dry or lack chocolate flavour. They lack intensity and richness that a chocolate cake should have. It's just different.

There is a chocolate sponge cake recipe I generally use that made of majorly melted chocolate. It's springy, dense with intense chocolate flavour. The beauty of home baking is that you can choose to use better ingredients and not worry about the profit.

I recently purchased the book Miette by Meg Ray with Leslie Jonath. Although I have never been to Miette the last time in San Francisco, the photos of the lovely cakes catches my eye. There's also this double chocolate cake recipe that has both melted chocolate and huge amount of cocoa powder. The product is intensely dark in colour, super moist, and relatively easy to make. I used this recipe to make cupcakes to go with my white sesame buttercream left from grandma's birthday cake, and it was super delicious. This recipe is definitely a keeper.
(Sorry, I won't be posting the recipe on my blog.)

Do Judge With the Cover

Maybe it was a coincidence, or maybe it was my subconscious, I really wanted to pay a visit to a cupcake store I read about on several blogs. That was the Saturday when I had to go back to the office to work alone for a deadline. I was depressed and stressed, yet very distracted because of the nice warm weather. Getting myself a cupcake seemed a way of comfort and a good excuse to procrastinate.

This cupcake shop is tucked in a small street near King Street and Yonge Street, very convenient for any office workers nearby.

The shop was quite big with no seating. There is a cake display at the cashier and all the available cupcakes were lined up neatly on roller trays behind. I picked up a Mom's golden buttermilk cupcake with strawberry butter icing. The cake lady put it nicely in an individual box. It looks so nice and presentable; however, the store doesn't carry small enough bags to hold an individual cupcake. I had to put it in my big purse, trying to be level on my way through the public transit.

The ride was only 30 mins, and I managed to be sitting down with the cake box level on my lap.

Unfortunately by the time I got back to the office, this is what i got:

oh no!

Icing Avalanche!

Lesson learned: packaging is all important for the cake business. How is the cake going to travel? Can the cake survive in normal weather? How can the customer carry the cake? There's definitely more to think about other than making the cake tasty and pretty.

Full of Passion

 

I love passion fruit, but in this city where half of the time is covered with snow it is not easy to find. I have always wanted to purchase frozen passion fruit puree but that's hard to find too. I was so lucky to come across some fresh ones last week when I was grocery shopping! I couldn't resist to snatch a few to make some sweet goodies from it!

This is a coconut cupcake with passion fruit buttercream. There are so many praises online so I had high hopes for the cupcakes; however, I found the taste of coconut is lacking when paired with the strong tasting passion fruit. This cupcake recipe has room for improvement.

Regardless, I couldn't resist eating the buttercream by the spoon.