Be Creative

Champagne Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Frosting

I volunteered to make some cupcakes for a surprise mini shower for work today.  The second-time-mom-to-be happens to be a fan of champagne cake and I made it for her birthday about month ago. I had never attempted a Champagne cake, nor do I think I'd even heard of one. So, I "googled it" and came across a number of various recipes and reviews. I ended up trying this one. I was very suprised and happy with the results. As one reviewer stated, Champagne cake is like a cross between Angel Food Cake and Pound Cake.  I though that was such a strange comparison, linking those two types of cake, but it truly tastes like a mixture of the two. 

I decided to repeat the recipe but changed up the frosting this time around.  Here's how I made the Champagne Cupcakes: 

Ingredients

• 1 box (1-pound 2 1/4-ounce) moist white cake mix
• 1 1/4 cups extra dry Champagne (I used Martini & Rossi Asti, not dry)
• 1/3 cup vegetable oil
• 3 large egg whites

Directions

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Place cupcake papers in a cupcake pan.

In a large mixing bowl combine the cake mix, Champagne, vegetable oil, and egg whites. Beat on low speed with an electric mixer until just combined. Scrape down the sides of the bowl with a rubber spatula and continue beating on medium speed for 2 minutes.

Pour the batter into the cupcake papers filling 2/3rds full and bake for 15 to 20 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the cake comes out clean. Remove them from the oven and cool completely.

While the cupcakes are cooling, you can begin to prepare the frosting. For today's cupcakes, I chose this Cream Cheese Frosting:

Ingredients

• 8 ounces cream cheese, room temperature
• 8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter, cut into pieces, room temperature
• 1 cup confectioners' sugar
• 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

Directions

1. Place cream cheese in a medium mixing bowl. Using a rubber spatula, soften cream cheese. Gradually add butter, and continue beating until smooth and well blended. Sift in confectioners' sugar, and continue beating until smooth. Add vanilla, and stir to combine.

Final Steps:

Frost the cupcakes and taste one to ensure success (wink)!

Nutella Cheesecake Pumpkin Muffins, the recipe...

I posted a picture of these yesterday for Wordless Wednesday but thought I'd follow up with the recipe today.  (My friend) Jamie's birthday was last week on the 20th and I wanted to make something special for her.  She loves any kind of cake, or sweet, with pumpkin, cinnamon, nutmeg, etc.  And I had been reading about how a lot of people were finding recipes through Pinterest.  So, I started my search there. Amoung the many that I found, I decided to make Nutella Cheesecake Pumpkin Muffins, originally posted by My Name Is Snickerdoodle.

These "muffins" can be defined in two words:  Simply Awesome!

Another plus? The recipe is really quite simple, as follows:

Muffin
4 eggs
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 1/2 cup vegetable oil
1 15 oz can pumpkin puree
3 cups flour
2 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp nutmeg
2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt

Cheesecake Filling
1 8oz cream cheese, softened
1/2 cup Nutella
1 egg

Preheat oven to 375°. In a large bowl, beat eggs slightly. Add in sugar, pumpkin and oil and beat thoroughly. Add in remaining dry ingredients and mix until smooth.

In a small bowl, beat together cream cheese, Nutella and egg until smooth.

Place paper liners in a muffin tin. Place about 2 tablespoons of pumpkin batter into liner, then 1 tablespoon of Nutella batter, then top with 2 more tablespoons of pumpkin batter. Bake for 18-22 minutes. These are best served completely cooled. Makes approximately 24 muffins.

And there you have it, Simply Awesome!

Plum update...

By Saturday night, all the plums that had been picked were washed, cut and bagged.  Ended up with a total of eight 1-gallon bags of cut plums. Pretty amazing considering we spent less than a 1/2 hour picking the plums and there is still so much fruit on the tree.  So, what to do with all this fruit?  I'm now on the hunt for some different plum recipes, but quickly found a plum crisp and decided to go for it...

Made a version of this Plum Oatmeal Crisp last night, by Martha Stewart, with a couple substitutions.  The recipe doesn't call for cinnamon, nutmeg, etc in the "crisp" but most berry or apple crisps seem to use it.  And we were out of cinnamon, but we had Pumpkin Pie spice. So we added about a tsp. of Pumpkin Pie Spice.  

Another thing we didn't have on hand for this? Brown Sugar.  So, "Googled" a substitution and tried this:

  1 cup granulated sugar                                                                                    3 T Molasses (I only used approx. 1.5 T for "light brown" sugar)

Results:  The crisp had great flavor but was a little too sweet.  Definitely have enough plums to try this again, but I might be omitting nearly all of the sugar and possibly reducing the butter in the topping.  But overall, it was still great served warm with a little vanilla ice cream.