Christmas Cupcake Overkill
When I read about red velvet cupcakes with peppermint white chocolate frosting on the food blog Je Mange La Ville (sorry no link; the site is down), I determined to make them for Christmas. I don’t know why, but something about red velvet was compelling, even though I know it’s all food coloring.
The original recipe for cupcakes and frosting was from the cake doctor, and involved a mix for the cupcakes. I don’t do mixes. (OK, OK, I do use those Annie’s microwave mac & cheese mixes for my son Drake, and have been oddly addicted to them myself during the pregnancy, but other than that, no mixes.) The author of Je Mange pointed out a red velvet recipe at Epicurious, so I decided to check that out, search for others, and compare. What I found was that red velvet recipes weren’t all that consistent. Some called for 2 ounces of red food coloring, others for just one, some called for cake flour, others didn’t, the amount of cocoa varied widely, etc. Also, most of them said to mix the red food coloring with the cocoa to form a paste. That’s silly, I thought. Why not add the food coloring with the liquid ingredients and the cocoa with the dry? When my cupcakes came out strangely variegated, bright red with brownish streaks, I thought, OK, maybe not so silly.
This lack of consistency is why I’m such a fan of the recipes of Cook’s Illustrated, where they test the daylights out of a recipe, then come up with a master. When I cook from their recipes, I get outstanding results. Alas, they have never seen fit to do a red-velvet cake recipe, and I think I now know why.
I used the Epicurious recipe mostly, leaving out the extra water and increasing the cocoa by a tablespoon. The recipe made 23 cupcakes, and they took far longer to bake than the indicated time. What resulted were fine, but by no means outstanding, cupcakes. They were a disturbing bright red, so if I made them again I would only use 1 oz food coloring. The texture was good though the outsides were a bit tough, and they had a faint, pleasant cocoa flavor.
The frosting turned out better, but the white chocolate tasted over the top. After sampling several of them, I am convinced that a better holiday dessert would be a dark chocolate cupcake with a simpler peppermint frosting, either cream cheese or buttercream. Additionally, baking 2 dozen cupcakes at once didn’t work. While I’m all for more cupcakes, I think it would be better to use a smaller recipe that yielded just a dozen cupcakes, or bake a larger batch one dozen at a time.