Sunday, September 9, 2013 – Some of you have seen this already, but for most of you, this is your first look into what I’ve been working on for the past few weeks.
It all started a few months ago when I was experimenting with eggs. I upped the egg count from 2 eggs to 3, and one of my cohorts commented that it tasted cakey. That mulled in my head for a few days, and suddenly the idea of making cookie cupcakes came to mind. And I don’t mean making a cupcake with chocolate chips. But taking cookie dough and putting it in a cupcake tray. So I did.
In my first attempt, I started with cookie dough, but I tweaked it to make it a bit more cakey. Since something as solid as a cookie might be too overwhelming in the cupcake form factor. So I added a bit of milk, slightly reduced the flour, doubled the baking powder, and baked at a nice low 325 F.
Unfortunately, the cupcakes collapsed under their weight.
I have a few theories here. Baking at lower temperatures means slower and more even baking, so the cookie cupcake took longer to set, so it collapsed because it was still soft. The other theory is that the extra baking powder caused it expand more than it could handle. So cut baking powder back to normal. What else can I do? Well, eggs and flour help structure, so more eggs and more flour. And cut the milk so the extra moisture from the eggs doesn’t put the cupcake into overload. Oh, and raise the temperature to, I dunno, 350 F.
Take 2, things look a bit better. Notice how the cupcake doesn’t go all the way to the top, which tells me the reducing the baking powder was effective.
Except things are overcooked on the outside, but underbaked on the inside.
This is clearly uneven cooking. Which means I need to go back to lower temperatures. Hopefully, tweaking the ingredient ratios and reducing the baking powder did the trick.
Take 3, except this time is the real thing. I’m baking these cupcakes for the bake sale, so they need to go right. Here goes nothing.
Wow, that’s a lot of cupcakes. 3 dozen cupcakes in total. Also, it looks like they came out perfectly, outside and in. In case you haven’t figured it out from other pictures, I topped the cookie cupcakes with Nutella and chocolate sprinkles.
So is this the end? Not quite. The current recipe is 2 sticks of butter and 3 eggs. Which is really awkward if I need to make a half batch. It’s time to find out if reducing the baking powder and increasing the flour alone will do the trick. I’m thinking reducing to 2 eggs and adding 50g milk. But it’s time to take a break from this while I do more experiments with cookies.
In the meantime, here’s an awesome pic from Take 1.
