Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Spring has sprung cupcakes

In honor of spring, we made cupcakes. I discovered these amazingly creative rainbow cupcakes on Collaborative Curry’s blog in honor of St. Patricks Day. But since we had three sick kids on St. Patrick’s Day, no one really felt like whipping up six-colored cupcake batter. Additionally, since we used up all the red food coloring in the pantry on the red velvet birthday cake, the full rainbow of colors wasn’t really an option. Four-colored cupcake batter was created: Yellow, green, blue and the most beautiful and springy lime green color. (In fact, the lime green was exactly the color of the crocus leaves popping up in my front yard!)
We followed Collaborative Curry’s directions to pour the (rather runny) batter in the center of each cupcake wrapper and not stir.


 The coloring turned out great. However, as you can see, the cakes fell. I believe I should have added the full 1 ½ teaspoon baking soda. I may have under-baked them slightly so they would retain the amazing moistness Collaborative Curry wrote about – this may also have contributed to the fallen cakes.
Lastly, you may want to add those two additional tablespoons of sugar in the recipe to keep the cakes from being a bit tough. But with all those colors, what kid will notice the cakes are less-than-super-sweet. And with the delicious aroma and taste of 1 ½ teaspoon of vanilla, adults too will eat every crumb.

Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Happy Paczki Day

Yesterday was Fat Tuesday; or in any place where wonderful Polish bakeries exist, it's Paczki Day.  These traditionally Polish raised donuts are filled with a super-sized amount of jelly and are usually sold only one day a year - the day of feasting before a traditional fast on Ash Wednesday. 

It makes me smile to ponder that no one seems to know that the singular form of paczki is paczek (according to the Detroit Free Press tweet yesterday.) Obviously, no one else can eat just one either.

We certainly didn't. My dear husband was at Kirschbaum's (a local German bakery which has embraced the Polish tradition) by 7:30AM for a box of these fried yeasty yummies.  They were fresh, thickly sprinkled with powdered sugar and filled with poppyseed, strawberry, blueberry, cheese (a cream cheese custard) and Strawberries & Cream fillings. The blueberry was terrible - the filling was fake food chemicals. (My kids still ate the sticky sweetness.)  But the poppyseed was amazing.