Martha Monday - Apple Spice Cupcakes with Brown Sugar Icing

Whew! It's been a busy few weeks. I hope that all my readers had a wonderful Thanksgiving. We are now full-throttle into the holiday season. Next Martha Monday, I am planning to start up my December holiday cupcakes.

Today is a throwback episode - we're staying on Thanksgiving cupcakes for one more week. I'm the traditional dessert maker in my family for holidays, and it's a job I take very seriously. I try to do something new and different every year to challenge myself. This year I made matching pies and cupcakes. We had pumpkin pie, apple pie, pumpkin cupcakes and apple spice cupcakes.

These cupcakes were only OK. They were heavy on the spice flavor and light on the apple flavor. They were tasty, but I was expecting more of an apple flavor. I did like the brown sugar icing though. That was a nice combination of sweet and tangy.

I apologize again for the lack of pictures - I baked and frosted these at my family's house and it was pretty hectic, instead of my usual leisurely baking in my own kitchen, which usually turns out to be as much photo shoot as baking.

To frost the cupcakes, you could use either an offset spatula or a decorating bag fitted with a tip. I frosted with a bag and tip. I used a Wilton 1M tip and got the big puffy swirls of frosting that everyone always seems to love.

Cupcakes

2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking soda
3/4 tsp salt
2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1/8 tsp cloves
1/2 cup unsalted butter, room temperature
1 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup packed brown sugar
4 eggs, room temperature
1 1/2 cups unsweetened applesauce

1. Preheat oven to 350°. Line standard muffin tins with paper liners.
2. Whisk together flour, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves.
3. With an electric mixer on medium-high speed, cream butter and both sugars until pale and fluffy. Add eggs, one at a time, until each is incorporated, scraping down sides of bowl as needed.
4. Reduce speed to low. Add applesauce and then flour mixture, beating until just combined after each.
5. Divide batter evenly among lined cups, filling each 3/4 full.
6. Bake, rotating tins halfway through, until a cake tester inserted in centers comes out clean, about 20 minutes. Transfer tins to wire racks to cool completely before removing cupcakes.

Brown Sugar Cream Cheese Frosting

1/2 cup unsalted butter, room temperature
8 ounces cream cheese, room temperature
1 cup packed brown sugar

1. With an electric mixer on medium-high speed, beat butter, cream cheese and brown sugar until smooth. Use immediately, or refrigerate up to three days in an airtight container. Before using, bring to room temperature, and beat on low speed until smooth.

Martha Monday - Pumpkin Patch Cupcakes

I will start off by apologizing for my lack of photos in this post. I was having some camera issues and did not get the step-by-step photos that I've done in previous weeks. Fear not, brave readers, as I know you're smart and can follow the directions without step-by-step photos to produce your own beautiful pumpkin patch cupcakes.

Pumpkin Patch Cucpakes


Cupcakes

2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp ground ginger
½ tsp nutmeg
¼ ground allspice
1 cup packed brown sugar
1 cup granulated sugar
1 cup unsalted butter, melted and cooled
4 large eggs, lightly beaten
1 can pumpkin puree

1. Preheat oven to 350° F.
2. In a medium bowl, flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, and the spices.
3. In another bowl, whisk together the butter, brown sugar, granulated sugar and eggs. Add dry ingredients and whisk until smooth. Then whisk in pumpkin puree.
4. Line cupcake pan with liners and fill each about halfway with batter. Bake until tops spring back when touched and a cake tester comes out clean, about 20-25 minutes. Rotate pans if needed.
5. Transfer to wire rack and let cool completely before icing.

Cream Cheese Icing

8 oz. cream cheese, room temperature
½ butter, room temperature
3 cups icing sugar, sifted
1 tsp pure vanilla extract

Beat butter and cream cheese until light and fluffy. Add vanilla and sugar.

When cupcakes are frosted, top with your own marzipan pumpkins and listen to the crowd ooh and aah!

I sent these cupcakes to work with Mr. Cute, and they were extremely popular. Everyone likes the cute marzipan pumpkins on top of the delicious pumpkin & cream cheese flavors from the cupcakes!

Marzipan Pumpkins - Not as difficult as I thought it would be!

One of the reasons that baking appeals to me is that it's accessible, yet still challenging. I've been baking since I was a little kid; I started baking with my mom when I was 5 or 6 years old. I loved the predictability and the structure of baking. Follow these directions in this order, and at the end you'll have something that resembles the picture in the book. Really, it's a very simple formula.

But for all my experience, there are still many things I've never done while baking. Some of them are things that seemed too difficult or challenging. I try to push myself and try new things. One of these new things was marzipan. I'd never worked with marzipan before. When I was in France last year, I saw tons of marzipan fruits in the market, and they looked beautiful, but very difficult to make.

Really, though, it was silly for me to worry. This called on my experience as a preschool teacher, since it was like playing with playdough. I got my marzipan at Fairway, and I've never looked for it at any other store, but I bet the baking section of a regular grocery store would have marzipan.


I took the marzipan out of the box, and it was wrapped in foil. I cut the ends of the foil and squeezed the marzipan paste out onto a sheet of parchment paper on the counter. I kneaded it once or twice to get it slightly flat and round. I used about 2/3 of the package for orange pumpkins and saved 1/3 for green for stems. To do it again, I'd save much less for green because I really didn't need that much green for the stems.


Wearing gloves, I dabbed orange gel paste food coloring with a toothpick. I continued to knead and add the food coloring until I was happy with the orange color.


I kneaded the marzipan until it was completely orange, then I formed a long snake of marzipan.


I cut the marzipan snake into 24 smaller pieces and rolled each one into a ball.


I dipped a toothpick into some vegetable oil.


This was the trickiest part of the pumpkins. I made a small indentation on the top of each pumpkin with my finger. From the indentation at the top, I dragged the toothpick (use the side of the toothpick, not the pointy tip) down the sides to make the indented ridges. I did 4 or 5 ridges on each pumpkin.


Then I took the green marzipan, combined it with small pieces of the orange and swirled the 2 colors together. When the green and orange were together, I made a small skinny rope and cut it into 24 very small pieces for stems to put on the pumpkins. Placing the stems was really easy, considering that marzipan is about the same consistency as playdough. Just as with playdough, if you want a piece to stick onto another piece, you just push it on and it will stick.


All in all, I should not have been as scared of marzipan as I was. At least pumpkins. Maybe some of those French fruits that I saw in the market would have been harder, but pumpkins were really easy.

If you do some marzipan pumpkins, I would definitely recommend wearing gloves to prevent the food coloring from staining your hands. Also, cover your counter or table with parchment paper to prevent the food coloring from staining.

Marzipan fruits in France. Not as difficult as you might think!

Martha Monday - Candy Filled Brownie Cupcakes

Welcome back to the second installment of Martha Monday. Today we will be discussing the Candy Filled Brownie Cupcakes. In Martha's cookbook, she calls them Mint Filled Brownie Cupcakes, and they use a bag of York Peppermint Patties. I did not have Peppermint Patties, but I did have a bag of peanut butter cups left over from Halloween. Rather than buy an additional bag of candy and continue to have Halloween leftovers, I decided to use the peanut butter cups in place of the peppermint patties.

1) Preheat your oven to 350° and line a standard muffin tin with paper liners. (Any color will do this week.)

2) These brownie cupcakes do not require many ingredients. You will need:
8 ounces of bittersweet or semisweet chocolate
1 stick of butter, cut into 1/2 pieces, room temperature
1 cup granulated sugar
3/4 teaspoon salt
3 large eggs
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 cup unsweetend Dutch-process cocoa powder
12 small candies (Martha says peppermint patties, but I used peanut butter cups.)



3) Place chocolate in butter in a heatproof bowl over a pan of simmering water. Stir occasionally just until melted, about 4-5 minutes.


4) This is what mine looked like after a few minutes. It had not melted yet!


5) Remove bowl from heat. Whisk in sugar and salt until mixture is smooth. Whisk in eggs to combine.


6) Gently whisk in flour and cocoa just until smooth. Do not overmix.


7) Spoon 1 heaping tablespoon of batter into the bottom of each muffin liner.


8) Place one candy on top and gently press into batter.


9) Top with 2 more tablespoons of batter, covering the candy completely.


10) Bake, rotating tin halfway. When a cake tester comes out clean (above the candy) brownie cupcakes are done, about 35 minutes.


11) Transfer pan to a wire rack to cool completely before removing cupcakes.


These were pretty good. They were a little thick and dry for my taste, but they were still pretty good. It went well with a glass of milk! It probably would have been better with the peppermint patties, but as a way to use up leftover candy, it was not bad at all!

Tune in next week for a special Thanksgiving-themed Martha Monday!

Thanksgiving at Palmer's Market

Run, Tom Turkey! Sorry for the turkey joke, but it was timely. We were on our way to Palmer's Market in Darien, for their annual Thanksgiving at Palmer's meal. Every year, they put out samples of their Thanksgiving offerings from their catering department. I always look forward to this pre-Thanksgiving feast. While we were driving to Palmer's, we saw these turkeys by the side of the road in New Canaan. I sure hope they know to stay in hiding for another week or so...


Palmer's invites their customers to come back into their store kitchen to sample their tasting menu for Thanksgiving. Last year, it seemed like a much smaller event. We couldn't figure out if fewer people came, or if we were there later, but either way there were more people this year. We had to wait in a line to get into the kitchen! The Palmer's employees were so kind (and smart) and started passing some hors d'oeuvres to all the people waiting in line. We were offered salmon roulades on toast, ahi tuna tartare and gruyere puffs. My favorite was a tie between the gruyere puffs and the ahi tuna tartare. Because I couldn't decide which I liked best, I had to sample several of each!



When we got into the kitchen, one staff member was serving a warm butternut squash puree.


Then we went around the corner, where they were offering 3 types of stuffing - cornbread, chestnut, and traditional. All were delicious!


Here's my plate - on it, you'll see turkey, gravy, mashed potatoes, whole cranberry relish, portobello mushrooms with artichokes, 3 types of stuffing, roasted fingerling potato, haricots verts almondine, grilled asparagus, bourbon whipped sweet potatoes, oven-roasted root vegetables, creamed spinach and cranberry orange relish. Yes, I'm pretty much writing now from a food coma.


This is a closeup of the pumpkin sage risotto, which I loved. It was one of my favorite samples tonight. Even cooler is that if you order it from the Palmer's catering department, they serve it in a sugar pumpkin! I can't even imagine how cute that is!


After eating that entire plate of food, I managed to roll myself over to the bakery department, where the talented Megan Palmer Dean was handing out plates of dessert samples. We got a plate with chocolate cheesecake, maple pecan pie, pumpkin pie, pumpkin cheesecake, and pear almond tart. As I walked over to the bakery, I was thinking that I couldn't possibly eat another bite. I considered passing on the dessert course this year. Then I got there and saw the plate! I ate all of the dessert too.


All in all, it was a delicious meal and I'm glad we went! What a nice way to get myself into a holiday mood. Now I need to practice my post-turkey dinner nap!

Martha Monday - Cookies & Cream Cheesecakes

As many of you may already know, I love to bake. Often, I will buy a new cookbook and find myself inspired to try some new recipes. Such was the case when I recently got the Martha Stewart Cupcake cookbook. As I flipped through the pages, I thought, "I could make that," or "I would eat this." And then I wondered, "What if I made all the cupcakes in the book? What if blogged my experiences doing it?" I was thinking like Julie & Julia but with cupcakes. Danielle & Martha? Whoa...

So it may take a few years, but on Mondays, please join me as I demonstrate a new recipe courtesy of the Martha Stewart Cupcakes cookbook.

This week, I wanted to start off with something easy to kick off Martha Mondays. I decided to go with the Cookies & Cream Cheesecakes. They look beautiful, and really, Oreo cheesecake? How could it be bad?

1) Preheat your oven to 275°. Start by lining 30 standard cupcake pans with white liners. (Well, you can use whatever color you want, but white works best for the big reveal at the end.)

2) Into each white liner, place an Oreo cookie on the bottom.

3) To make the batter, here's what you'll need:

2 pounds of cream cheese, room temperature

1 cup of sugar

1 tsp vanilla

4 eggs, room temperature

1 cup of sour cream

Pinch of salt

12 Oreo cookies, coarsely chopped

4) On medium-high speed, beat cream cheese until it is smooth. Gradually add 1 cup sugar until combined. Add 1 tsp of vanilla.

5) Add eggs, drizzling in a little bit at a time. Continue to beat until incorporated. Scrape down the sides of the bowl, if needed.

6) Beat in sour cream and salt.
7) (This is the part where I went overboard. It's 12 Oreos. You could definitely do this with a knife. But last week I got a new food processor for my birthday and I wanted to test it out. So for the next 2 steps, I will show off my awesome food processing skills.) Load up 12 Oreos into the food processor.

8) Press pulse until the Oreos are coarsely chopped.

9) Stir the Oreos into the batter by hand. Combine them until they look like this.

10) Divide the batter evenly into the waiting cups. Just pile it right on top of the Oreos. Martha says that you're supposed to fill the liners until they're "almost full" which I thought I did. I would go one step further and say fill them. I didn't fill them enough, and then they were short. So mine are smaller than yours could be.

Bake in the 275° oven for about 22 minutes. Rotate once, halfway through cooking. Transfer to wire racks to cool completely. Then refrigerate for at least 4 hours.
This is what they will look like after they have been refrigerated.

The white liner really helps to show off the Oreo here! Isn't that cool? Though I wish I had picked one for a photo that was centered better. Oh well.

This is what it looks like upside down without the liner on.
And here's the money shot. I promise, it tastes as good as it looks, too!

So far, after one episode, Martha Monday looks like it will be a lot of fun. Stay tuned next week for a new recipe for Martha Monday!

Connecticut has a Fairway Market!

On Wednesday, November 3, Fairway Market opened its first Connecticut outpost in Stamford. The store opened for shoppers at 9 and the Opening Ceremony began at 10. We were there, bright and early, and we arrived around 9:20. It wasn't hard to find parking since the lot was crowded, but not full.

Here's what the front of the store looks like from the parking lot.


We walked through the produce section, where we saw the most gorgeously arranged fruits and vegetables. This was one of those situations where I had a mental image for the photo I wanted to take, and the real photos never came out looking like what I wanted, so I don't have any pictures of it. But take my word for it, the produce is beautiful. There are 2 sections of the store - traditional and organic, so the produce is also arranged like that. It can be kind of tricky though, because there are entire aisles of traditional and aisles of organic. So don't think that the potatoes you're near are the only potatoes in the store. I looked at pears and I was surprised to only see 2 varieties of pears. Then I looked up at the sign and saw I was in the organic section. There are only 2 varieties of organic pears, but if you go around the corner, there are 6 varieties of traditional pears. So if you think the store doesn't have something, it actually might. The good thing is that every employee is super friendly, so ask someone and they will take you right where you need to go!

Just past the produce section is one of my most favorite parts of the store - the cheese/deli/olive oil area! This is the part of the store where they let you try samples of WHATEVER YOU WANT. Any cheese they sell, if you ask the cheese guys about it, they'll open it right up, cut you off a sample and ask you what you think. So far I've tried so many cheeses I cannot even remember what they all are. I can tell you that they were all delicious though!

Across the main aisle from the cheese and deli counters is the olive oil department. Most grocery stores have an olive oil shelf, true. Fairway has a veritable olive oil room. There is a shelf with containers of bread, and you just dip that bread right into any olive oil you want to try. There are probably 20 olive oils out for sampling at any time. There are usually some balsamic vinegars and a few dips or spreads out for sampling as well. A person can get mighty full between the cheese and olive oil departments!



Fact: We needed a Fairway and we didn't even know it!



These 2 signs hang in the prepared food/hot bar section. We've already had dinner there and it was pretty good. We had a crab cake sandwich with chipotle mayonnaise, and a lobster roll and a cone of French fries. They were all pretty good. It wasn't the best crab cake sandwich/lobster roll/fries I've ever had, but it sure wasn't the worst either. For a grocery store cafe, I was definitely impressed with the amount of food they offered. It reminded me of a full-service cafeteria with a hot bar, a rotisserie, a grill for burgers, a sandwich area, a salad bar, and an ice cream counter. You know that old adage, "Never grocery shop when you're hungry"? Well, now you don't have to. You can eat at the Fairway cafe and then shop.

They have interesting quotes from authors and chefs hanging all over the store. I love this one. I've been reminding myself to be fearless since Fairway opened. I do wish I had gotten a picture of this quote with less glare.


Across from the hot foods area is the coffee and tea room, where this big coffee roaster is located. I'm so glad that I snapped this picture on Opening Day, because I've looked at it every day since and it was only in action the first time I went. If I drank a lot of coffee, I know for sure I'd enjoy this room. There are more types of coffee in here than I'd ever seen before!


Next, we come to the full-service butcher. So far, everyone's been extremely helpful and nice there. I haven't gotten any meat yet, but I think I might this week. It seems like they do everything, from boning chickens to grinding meat to stock tips and sports scores. I haven't asked for any scores yet either, but you just never know...



Then we're in the baking aisle and the candy aisle. Have you ever seen so many kinds of chocolate?


Have you ever seen so many kinds of sugar? (And if you're looking for marzipan, it's in the top left corner of this aisle. More on marzipan later this week...)


They have everything at Fairway. Including dog food with beagles on it. You know I'm a sucker for beagles, so obviously cans of dog food with beagles will get a mention.


Into the dairy section we go. Here are full jars of yogurt, which I thought were very cool because of the separation. It's rare that I see yogurt in anything but tiny plastic containers with foil lids, so I was intrigued.


And as always, we end this trip to Fairway with cupcakes. I have yet to sample my way through Fairway's cupcakes, so I can't tell you how they taste. They do look pretty though. And who doesn't love a cupcake?


Welcome to Connecticut, Fairway! I hope we have a long-lasting relationship. In fact, I'll probably be there again later today. Oh, that's the other thing I'm discovering about Fairway - I seem to go almost every day.