Sour Cream Chocolate Cupcakes and Chocolate Sour Cream Frosting

I was browsing for a recipe to use up my sour cream and I remembered this chocolate cupcake recipe that I bookmarked a while ago. After I made it, I was glad that I remembered this recipe. These are the best chocolate cupcakes I have tried baking so far; my brother rated them a 9.2.

The recipe resulted in denser cupcakes, with a deeper chocolate taste. The frosting was also very good, but mine were a bit grainy. Maybe you’re supposed to use a mixer, instead of hand mixing? I also think I baked them longer than I was supposed to because although the cupcakes were really soft after I took them out of the tin, after they cooled down they developed “crusts” (only on the edges though). But after you let them sit out for a day, they become moist again.

I made this all the way back in February. Just this past Saturday I made a birthday cake for my brother. Looking back at this recipe, I'm surprised by the similarity between the cake recipe I used and this cupcake recipe. I'll be sharing that recipe tomorrow hopefully, my blog's 1st birthday! I was shocked when I found out that tomorrow is the anniversary, because I always thought I made my blog in May. How forgetful I am!

Sour Cream Chocolate Cupcakes and Chocolate Sour Cream Frosting
Recipe from Baking Bites

Lemon and Matcha Marble Pound Cake and Award

I remember seeing this recipe for the first time and thinking, wow that's a lot of eggs! So, I halved the recipe and ended up with a short cake. It was very pretty and my brother rated it a 9. I reduced the sugar from 260 grams to 220 I didn't want to risk the texture, but I knew that Von's pound cake had less sugar so it would be fine. Next time, I will try further reducing the sugar.

This cake is relatively simple to make, you don't even need a mixer! I just did everything by hand. The texture was really nice. I didn't have humongous holes, maybe that's because hand mixing makes it harder to get holes.

But I tend to have a problem with marbling cakes! I don't marble them enough because I'm scared of mixing the batters into one shade of color. :/

Lemon and Matcha Marble Pound Cake

Rich and Sweet Berry Scones and Award

These scones are pretty fun to make because you can pretend that you're making puff pastry because of the folds you need to make. They weren't too sweet and sprinkling some sugar on the tops is a good idea. I did not brush the tops with butter because I felt that it was unnecessary, and I only topped one scone with sugar. The sugar topped scone was less prone to browning. It also made for a prettier scone. While I baked these scones, butter leaked out. I don't think that's supposed to happen, but I don't know what I did wrong. Anyway I hope you enjoy the recipe.

Also, this past week I received an award from Lena from Frozen Wings. I didn't get around to writing this post until now, but I would like to thank her for giving me my first award. It really means a lot with me and I would like to share it with several other bloggers. Please read more to find out who got the awards. Also, please check out Lena's blog; she has many beautiful bakes and delicious food. Thank you again Lena!

Rich and Sweet Berry Scones

Sour Cream Pound Cake Take Two

Recently, I always want to revisit the old recipes that I have tried and wasn't 100% satisfied with the results. I want to remake several things in hopes that I will be successful. So one of the recipes I revisited was the sour cream pound cake by Von. The cake tasted delicious, but it did not look as delicious as Von's because mine had humongous holes in it.

So I tried it again, baking it in a 8x4 inch pan and I was extra careful to avoid over mixing the batter. I didn't over mix it terribly last time, but just enough so that I was left with big holes. This time, I succeeded! The holes definitely aren't as big as last time's.

After
Okay, fine there still are lots of holes, but the first time's were huge.

Before


Batter and lined pan.

I line my pan by tearing a rectangle sheet of parchment paper and then cutting 4 long slits so that I can place it in the pan.

Smoothed out batter.

Tada!


Now a time of suspense, time to check for holes.

Chocolate Glazed Baked Doughnut Muffins

After going through several recipes, trying to use up my sour cream, I finished up the last of my sour cream with this recipe. Originally, I planned to make one batch of these donut muffins, but after realizing I would have a few tbsps of sour cream left, I decided to use up all the sour cream and adjust the amount of ingredients accordingly.

The method used to make these muffins involves reverse creaming. Reverse creaming is when you add butter to the dry ingredients and work it in, instead of creaming butter and sugar first. This makes the texture of the treat more tender and results in a tighter crumb. This method is also used when making scones and biscuits.

These donut muffins really did resemble donuts. They're the healthier version of donuts. I thought it tasted pretty good, not too sweet and nice texture. My brother didn't like these as much because he suspected me of putting whole wheat inside. (Shh, he doesn't know yet ;) My friend said that it was a bit dry, but I think that might be because it was a day old. I also gave one to my teacher because she loves cupcakes and this is classified as a cupcake imposter, she liked it enough to ask me for the recipe. With that said, I think these are best eaten the day of baking.

Chocolate Glazed Baked Doughnut Muffins
Recipe from Joy the Baker who adapted it slightly from Doughnuts
Recipe adjusted by me to make 12 doughnut muffins
makes 12 doughnut muffins




Please note: Because of my wacky adjustments, I used a scale to measure everything out and some ingredients were not measured out exactly as required... I bet you'll be laughing after you see how I adjusted the ingredients. :D

New York Style Coffee Cake

Last month, I bought a huge container of sour cream. I wanted to make Honey Bee Sweet's marble cake and to attempt making many more desserts that required sour cream. With that container of sour cream I was able to make 1 batch of scones, 1 marble cake, 1 sour cream pound cake, 1 New York style coffee cake and 1 batch of chocolate glazed donut muffins. I was halfway through the container of sour cream when I didn't know what else to make. I went on google reader and found this recipe that used a bunch of sour cream. Right then and there, I decided that I would make this cake.

The cake was pretty simple. The only problem I ran into while making this cake was I ran out of eggs. A few steps into the cake making, I looked in my fridge and discovered that we only had one egg left! Luckily, my aunt and uncle live only a few blocks away, so I quickly called and asked if I could have some eggs. My grandma answered the phone and said, "Come on over." I rode my bike there, got the eggs, returned home and promptly started continuing my cake mixing. Problem solved!

I didn't have a 9x13 glass pan so I used a 8x12 glass pan. I chose to decrease the topping by 25%. Boy am I glad I did that! When the cake was baking, it rose; if I had made the full amount of topping, my cake would have spilled over. That would have been a terrible disaster... Now it's time for the recipe.

Thanks to Karly from Buns In My Oven for sharing this recipe!


New York Style Coffee Cake
Very lightly adapted from Buns In My Oven who got the recipe from Baked Explorations
(I changed the proportion of the crumb topping and the cake. I also slightly decreased the amount of sugar in the cake.)

Chocolate Chip Sour Cream Marble Cake

On the last day of my grandparents stay in the U.S. I baked a cake for them. I had wanted to bake this cake a week ago, but I didn't get to it until today.

Many other bloggers have made this marble cake too and all of them gave excellent reviews. Thank you Honey Bee Sweets for sharing this recipe! I will definitely be using this recipe again and again.

Like what Honey Bee Sweets said, the cake had a nice velvety texture to it. Right out of the oven, it had a nice, thin crisp exterior. Although the two batters weren't distinguishable when the cake is viewed from the top, they are inside the cake. Cutting through the cake, I could tell that it was going to be very yummy. When I brought a piece to school the next day to share with my best friend, she told me that she enjoyed it very much.

While making this cake, I had some doubts. The batter was surprisingly thick! I was beginning to think that I did something wrong while I was folding in the flour. At one point it was so difficult to even make one fold that the batter even resembled soft cookie dough. The batter was even harder than my sugar cookie dough before it got chilled. Regardless, I proceeded as the recipe told me to and it turned out fabulously. The one thing I forgot to do was actually give the batter a few swirls, so the cake wasn't all that marbly. I know, I know, there's no such word, but I can't think of any better word to describe it.
Chocolate Chip Sour Cream Marble Cake
Recipe from Honey Bee Sweets and adjustments from Bakericious 

Ingredients for a 10 cup bundt cake
Chocolate Paste
2.5 tbsp cocoa powder
2.5 tbsp hot water

Sour Cream Chocolate Muffin

When I first saw these on Dodol&Mochi, I was intrigued. Her muffins looked moist and chocolaty; they also used sour cream! I think the sour cream was main reason why I made these muffins. Whenever I get sour cream, I always end up with a tiny bit left over that I don't know how to use up. So this post came out at the right time.

I would say the muffin is good. I thought that it was a bit oily though. The texture was nice and it reminded me of the chocolate muffins I made previously with the recipe from Cookie Madness. I just didn't like how oily it was because when I held the muffin and took my fingers away, I could see my fingers glistening with oil. What a contradiction right? I like to bake, but I don't like oily things. I have nothing against this recipe though. Something to take note of, my muffins look very different from Pei-Lin's muffins, so maybe it's something that I did?

Sour Cream Chocolate Muffin
Recipe from Dodol & Mochi
I made 8 muffins.


This one has a nicer dome. I don't know why, but my muffins don't look as moist as Pei-Lin's? :(

Sour Cream Pound Cake

So, I just baked my first pound cake today. (10/24/10) In fact, I am typing this post as it's baking in the oven right now.

I can't believe how it's already the end of October! Wow, then it's going to be November and then I will have to send in my college apps. These days I really wanted to bake some bread, especially some bread with matcha. However, my kitchen scale was not functioning even after I changed the batteries. Then one day I tried looking at the scale again and it worked. Whewf...I was so worried that my scale broke. It does use up batteries quite fast though.

I made this pound cake for English class because we just read the book Frankenstein, and now we have a non-fiction research project. I decided to do one on food during the Romanticism period. I discovered that pound cakes were created during the 1700s and that they are called pound cakes because of the simplicity of the ingredients. A pound of butter, sugar and butter along with some eggs would give a pound cake. Back then, most women couldn't read so just memorizing the ingredients by pounds made it much easier for them to make pound cakes.

Then I immediately thought of Von's recipe. She shared this beautiful pound cake recipe on her blog. It looked amazing! The texture was perfect and everything, so I just had to make it. I was a bit doubtful of how mine would turn out and I didn't get to try the recipe out until today because I ran out of yogurt/sour cream.

However, after making it, it wasn't that bad. I was worried mine would not turn out because I have very few successes on baking cakes. Luckily for me, the batter was pretty thick and it smelled really good. The only sad part was that there were a lot of holes in my pound cake.... it didn't look like Von's pretty, tight crumbed, yummy looking cake. I'm guessing that I might have overbeaten the eggs and incorporated extra air into the batter, causing the little holes. Please correct me if I'm wrong though.

Sour Cream/Yogurt Pound Cake
Recipe from Vondelicious who got it from the Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook

Sour Cream Chocolate Chip Scones

As you know, my family is a big lover of scones. If you didn't before, now you do. =D From the first time I made scones to the many other times after that, I have always used one recipe, the one from my Williams-Sonoma Sweet Treats book. Sure, I might have substituted some ingredients like evaporated milk for heavy cream, but I have never tried another scone recipe until today. I was only looking for a way to quickly use up the leftover sour cream I had from the black bottom cupcakes I made recently, when I stumbled upon this recipe. I bookmarked it immediately and finally made it today. (August 27)

Click here for recipe.

Btw, sorry for the terrible quality picture.

The texture of the scones were amazing. My grandma and dad loved these scones. They said it tasted much better than the scones I made before. The brown sugar gives these scones a surprisingly nice grainy texture between bites. Grainy might be a negative connotation when it comes to food, but it was perfect for these scones. What I mean is that you can still kind taste the brown sugar, it just adds to the already good scone. Also, right from the oven these scones were really nice and fluffy you could say. I gave some to my friend C. and her mom said that they tasted better than the bakery's scones. So thanks to Anna from Cookie Madness for this recipe.



Different lighting makes a big difference. And oh no, I think I might have broken the camera. That or it just broke suddenly. The zoom lens won't retract back in. :(


I made that awesome bread again!

This time I tried it with 3 fillings. Pork floss, turkey and swiss and coconut and raisin.



Update about school:
Wow, school is so busy already, at least it is for AP calc. There is so much hw for Calculus it's scary. Or more specifically, so much time spent doing the hw. English, a class I thought to be easy, is actually harder than I thought. The teacher is new and she's giving a lot of hw. Oh well, I'll survive. Now, there isn't a lot of weekend hw, but there is still a good amount. Spanish is taking me longer to finish than usual, as expected from an AP class. I already can't wait for the summer to come, haha. I get to go to Taiwan then as a graduation present and visit my grandparents and a few cousins there.

Black Bottom Cupcakes

After I got my cookbook, America's Test Kitchen Family Baking Book, I found this recipe. I was pretty interested in trying it out. I mean, why not? It had chocolate cupcake and cheesecake combined. So the week before school started, I made these. They were so simple to make! The only problem I had was with the baking time. I had to bake them way longer than called for, maybe it was because I substituted the dutch processed cocoa powder with natural unsweetened cocoa powder. I googled this recipe and found that other bloggers had made these before with no problem, so go ahead and give it a try.

They tasted really good. Rich cream cheese filling with a just right cupcake. My dad really loved it. When I brought the rest over to band camp, he was really disappointed.

Black Bottom Cupcakes
Recipe from America's Test Kitchen Family Baking Book
Makes 12

Use miniature chocolate chips to ensure that they will stay in the filling and not sink to the bottom of the cupcake instead.

Filling
8 ounces cream cheese, softened
1/4 cup (1 3/4 ounces) sugar
1/8 tsp salt
1 large egg white
1 tbsp sour cream
1/4 cup (1 1/2 ounces) semisweet mini chocolate chips

Cupcakes
Set A
3/4 cup all purpose flour
2/3 cup sugar
1/4 cup Dutch-proccessed cocoa (I used natural unsweetened cocoa powder)
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt

Set B
3/4 cup water, room temperature
6 tbsp sour cream, room temperature
4 tbsp unsalted butter, melted and cooled
1/2 tsp vanilla extract

Directions

Position oven rack to lower middle position and preheat oven to 400*F.

Filling
In a medium bowl, beat together the cream cheese, sugar and salt using an electric mixer on medium speed so that the mixture is smooth. (30 sec) Add egg white and sour cream and beat in, another 30 seconds. Add the chocolate chips and stir.

Cream cheese with sugar and salt.


After beating it for a few seconds.


This is what it should look like after the egg white and sour cream is added in.


The cc chips are soo cute! I love mini things.


Now, stir it in.

Cupcakes
Whisk together Set A in a large bowl until uniform in mixture. Whisk in Set B just until it all comes together.

Set A


Set B

Grease a 1/4 cup measure and portion batter into cupcake liners. Use a rounded tbsp of cream cheese mixture and plop in the middle of each cupcake. There might be extra, so just try to distribute the rest out evenly.



So yea, it was a bit more than 1 tbsp.

Bake for 18-22 minutes so that the tops of the cupcakes start cracking. Make sure to rotate cupcake tray halfway through baking. Afterward, let cupcake cool in tray for 10 minutes before cooling on wire rack.


:( Sunken tops, even more so than it should be.


Notes: I have no idea why I had to bake mine for so long. I did, however, take them out of the oven after 18 minutes and they kind of "deflated", but that's only because mine had to bake longer. So when I took them out they weren't even close to finishing baking. Opps. I'll try this recipe again one day. Anyway, because of the longer required baking time I was starting to get stressed out. I thought I had wasted my ingredients for these cupcakes, in the end they turned out fine. I'm the type of person who likes following directions and when something goes wrong I get really stressed. I like predictable things, not surprises and I can't stand failing or making mistakes whether in real life or baking.

I can't seem to do my hw, I don't understand it at all. So here I am taking a break instead and posting a long overdue post.

Cream Cheese Frosting

Cream cheese frosting is a great companion to red velvet cakes. This frosting melts on your tongue and is very easy to make.

Cream Cheese Frosting
Recipe from America's Test Kitchen Family Baking Book
Note from the book: do not use low fat/nonfat cream cheese b/c the frosting will become too liquidy. The frosting won't be good on a 3 layer cake because it has a softer and looser texture compared with other frostings. Also, if the frosting is too soft, just refrigerate until firm.
Makes 3 cups (enough for 24 cupcakes)

Ingredients
12 ounces cream cheese, softened
6 tbsp unsalted butter, cut into chunks and softened
4 tsp sour cream
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/4 tsp salt
1 3/4 cup confectioner's sugar

Directions
In a large bowl beat together everything except the confectioner's sugar, aka powdered sugar on medium high with an electric mixer until the mixture is smooth.

Reduce speed to medium low and add in the powdered sugar and beat until smooth. Adjust speed to medium high again and beat the frosting until it is light and fluffy.

Frosting can be refrigerated in airtight container for as long as 3 days. When ready to use, put frosting in room temperature until softened ~1 hour and then whip again with beater (medium speed) until smooth ~2 minutes or less.


Note:I quartered the frosting recipe because I was only planning on frosting like 6 cupcakes or so, but I was able to frost 8 cupcakes.




The texture of the frosting. Very light and fluffy. I think I forgot to take any other pictures, oops. But the instructions are very easy to follow, so no worries.


The frosting was enough for 8 cupcakes. The picture only shows 7 frosted cupcakes, but my brother ate one. :3