Cake #54 Coffee Fudge Cupcakes

In an effort to make Laura’s weekend a little easier, I decided to offer to make this week’s cake, a little earlier than usual though. As I will be away on Saturday in Atlantic City, a gift from Laura, she will be at home on cake baking day, alone with Evie. I don’t want to imply that Evie is not always a big help in the kitchen when it comes to getting stuff done, but  Evie is not always a big help in the kitchen when it comes to getting stuff done. She is the cutest of distractions that has a habit of grabbing “eggies” from the refrigerator and dropping them on the ground for fun and attempting to steal cooking utensils from the “baby-proof” drawers (ha) and run around the house with them. I have no doubt that the two will have a great Saturday together, but baking the cake of the week just seemed to be a silly addition to a hectic day. Furthermore, I love my wife and just wanted to help.

This week’s cakes are called Coffee Fudge Cupcakes, and they were actually a blast to make. As coffee extract is not an ingredient found on regular store shelves, I got to make my own. I started by brewing a small, but overly strong pot of coffee, and then boiled and simmered the result for thirty minutes to reduce it down to a coffee flavored extract. This ingredient was the key for the whole recipe. The rest of the cupcake was standard, calling for flour, baking powder, butter, sugar, eggs, and milk. The frosting was supposed to be home-made, but being myself, I naturally screwed it up, making quite properly the flavoring for the icing (butter, coffee extract, milk, brown sugar) by boiling the ingredients on the stove to make a smooth mixture, but then screwed up by attempting to beat this mixture into powdered sugar, instead of beating the sugar slowly into the mixture. Instead of a frosting, I was left with a crumbly coffee flavored mess. Luckily, Laura came in and pointed out that the crumbles could still make a great topping. She quickly got some store-bought butter cream icing from the cabinet, piped it onto the cupcakes, and then sprinkled the powder on top. As a finishing touch, a dark chocolate covered coffee bean was added on top!

Mine and Laura's cake:

The book's cake:

Check in next week to see what creative pastry is in the oven. Saturday will be our sixth anniversary, so whatever we do will be together!