In which I attempt to redeem my baking reputation.

The cookie pie incident of the previous week left me a little… shaken, I suppose. I decided to try my hand at these first. Cupcakes. I can handle that. And brownies. No problem. Though the construction requires a bit more effort than my usual cakes, they seemed simple enough. Despite a little problem of tinting my home made vegan buttercream, they came out looking rather nice, I think. BEHOLD!

This is how it all went down:

While watching the Sox game with the in-laws next door (which we lost, btdubs), and in between cocktails (grapefruit soda and vodka, if you’re curious), I ran home to check on the brownies periodically. I used a boxed mix. Shut up. I so do not lose any baker’s cred for that. I just can’t get my brownies to be gooey and fudgey like the boxed mix ones. I don’t remember which brand I used. Apart from being a little too sweet (and wicked oily), they were pretty decent.

The batter:

Out of the oven:

I used a cookie cutter to cut them in to discs for the patty portion of the cupcakes. I probably should have done this just after they cooled, instead of waiting until the next morning, because they were a little tricky to get out of the pan. I only broke a couple of them, so it wasn’t a complete disaster.

The patties are the bits on the right:

After several cocktails and a Red Sox loss, I decided I probably shouldn’t attempt the cakes before bed, so I waited ’til morning. I whipped up a batch of Golden Vanilla Cupcakes from VCTOTW for the buns. They came out a little flat, but that’s probably because I couldn’t find my measuring spoons and merely estimated the amounts of things. And about half way through I realized I had the oven on the wrong temperature. Oh, and I baked them naked in the pan (no liners) and I think I was a little over zealous with the cooking spray. They were a bit oily on the outside.

I had a little trouble with the fluffy vegan buttercream frosting this time around. I heated up the shortening to soften it (as I keep mine in the fridge) and I didn’t let it cool enough before adding the powdered sugar. The fat kept separating from the rest of the mixture. After alternating chilling and whipping (several times) I managed to get it to hold together well enough. I also had a little trouble with the color.

Adding the red:

No matter how much red I added, I couldn’t get it any darker than this lovely shade of pink. I didn’t want it to taste like vanilla flavored food coloring, so I gave up and decided that pink was now going to be a design feature rather than a failure.

Pink ketchup frosting:

Once the vanilla cakes were cooled, I sliced them in half, placed a brownie patty in between, piped on some pink ketchup frosting, and sprinkled some sesame seeds on top. JeT found these cute, plaid cupcake liners. I flattened them out a bit to hold each of the burger cupcakes.*

They were pretty tasty. Nom.

The cookie pie came out pretty well, too, though I still need to tweak the recipe and cooking time and temp. It was a little too doughy in the center. I was good and wrapped the edges with foil to keep them from burning, and I put it on a baking sheet this time. Once I get the recipe perfected, I shall post it along with some proper photos. Until then, here are a couple of teasers:

Batter up:

Looks better than it tastes:

We had a few friends over and played a little horseshoes, badminton, and sat around the fire chatting. It was a lovely, low-key evening. (Though I didn’t see any fireworks this year. I think I’ll have to remedy that soon.)

I hope you had a lovely Independence Day with plenty of food, friends, and family. And I hope you saw some spectacular fireworks.

*Did you ever see Good Will Hunting edited for TV? The scene where they get Kelly’s (I think) is edited beyond hilarity: Casey Affleck repeatedly says “gimme my fucking sandwich!” which is edited to “gimme my burger sandwich!” over and over and over. So now I have “gimme my burger cupcake!” in my head, with Casey Affleck’s voice. Which is awesome.