Yo Foodies,
This weekend I made the best ever cupcakes I’ve ever made in my entire life. Until now, I’d pretty much come to expect that I will never be able to make a cupcake as moist and fluffy as the chemically altered commercial boxed cake mixes with their specially treated flour not available to regular home users that’s even better than the crappy white cake flour we always are stuck buying.
However, I managed to make cupcakes that rival even those from a box mix using a secret ingredient to go along with proper technique – good old Scotch Whisky.
So I mixed 2 cups MULTIGRAIN flour – that’s right, not white AP or white cake but a multigrain flour with whole wheat and rye flours and flax seeds – with 2 tsp baking powder, 2 tsp baking soda, 1/8 tsp salt, 1 cup cocoa and 1 tsp instant coffee crystals.
In my Kitchen-Aid mixer, I creamed 1 cup of butter, 1 cup of organic white sugar, 1 cup of demarara brown sugar and then warmed two eggs in a 1 cup measuring glass filled with hot water. I then cracked the warmed eggs one at a time into the cream mixture. This is important as most people just throw in cold eggs which causes the butter to congeal and not coat the flour particles properly and then ruins a lot of the cakes ability to rise.
I then alternated adding in the dry ingredient mix with 1 cup of sour cream and a mix of 3/4 cup of my Glenmorangie 12 year old Portwood finished Scotch whisky and a tablespoon of my homemade vanilla extract.
The resulting batter was pretty dense and I was actually quite worried about how they were going to turn out. As it turns out, absolutely great after 20 minutes of baking at 350 degrees. The whisky along with the coffee truly adds depth to the cupcake and it comes off far better than the sugary sweet result from a box mix. From this mix, I got a total of 29 cupcakes just slightly above the two dozen I was expecting.
To finish these off, instead of a traditional buttercream frosting, I chose to make a ganache of 1/4 cup butter, 1 cup of Lindt 90% dark chocolate with an additional 2 triangle pieces of a 400 gram Toblerone dark bar, and 1/4 cup of more Glenmorangie in place of the usual cream. I melted this altogether over very low heat and as soon as came to just melted consistency, I stuck the tops of the cupcakes and swirled to cover them completely in the chocolate whisky ganache.
I then set these aside to cool and they were freakin’ awesome when done! The best part is that at no point was there ever enough heat to truly evaporate the alcohol out of the cupcakes so they were for all intents and purposes spiked cupcakes. Yum.