Going Back to Basics With a Taste of Yellow

Cancer has come into my world this year. I recently lost a 34 year old very close work friend of mine to Hodgkin's. I have another employee at work battling breast cancer and now a close friend of mine is watching her mother go through the same battle.

I had come from a family with a long line of heart disease in its history. I can't tell you how many bypass surgeries and angioplasties I have seen my family members sit through. It was really the only disease that I was exposed to. So to see the way cancer was affecting these people in my lives now, I couldn't sit still.

Next month I will be participating in the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure in Philadelphia. The race is on Mother's Day and in addition to my mother and myself, we will also be walking with a very close girlfriend of mine and her mother, who is an 8 year breast cancer survivor.

When I saw the Taste of Yellow Event on Winosandfoodies.com I had to enter.

http://winosandfoodies.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/04/a_taste_of_yell.html





I decided to step away from all the fancy, smancy new things I have been venturing to bake, and take a step back to my roots, cupcakes. They are my first baking love, so sweet, so simple, something almost everyone I know loves.

I don't know what really made me think of Boston cream pie cupcakes. I know its been done before, but it was always something I just wanted to try on my own. Eclairs always remind me of little versions of Boston cream pie. But there was always one issue in my family with them, the filling. My mother loves, loves, loves the vanilla pudding filling and my husband and I love with creamy white filling. So how do you solve that, make both. The cake is yellow and the filling on the one is yellow so that works for the event, right.

Something to make all members of my family happy.

Banana Cream Cupcakes with two fillings

Yellow Cupcake adapted from a recipe on Epicurious

3 cups flour

1 Tbsp baking powder

1/2 tsp salt

1 cup unsalted butter, room temperature

2 cups granulated sugar

5 large eggs

2 tsp vanilla extract

1 1/4 cups buttermilk

Preheat oven to 350°F

In a medium bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder, and salt.
Cut up the butter into 1-inch pieces and place them in the large bowl of an electric mixer, fitted with a paddle attachment or beaters. Beat for 3 minutes on MEDIUM-HIGH speed until the butter is light and creamy in color. Stop and scrape the bowl. Cream the butter for an additional 60 seconds.

Add the sugar, 1/4 cup at a time, beating 1 minute after each addition. Scrape the sides of the bowl occasionally. Add the eggs one at a time.

Reduce the mixer speed. Stir vanilla into the buttermilk. Add the dry ingredients alternately with the buttermilk. Mix just until incorporated. Scrape the sides of the bowl and mix for 15 seconds longer.

Spoon the batter in cupcake tins pretty close to the top, as they do not rise very much, and bake for approximately 18-20 minutes (oven time may vary). Let cupcakes cool, then cut an X into top of each cupcake with a knife.

For the vanilla pudding filling I cheated and used an instant pudding mix. Its not my favorite anyway, so I didn't feel that bad. For the cream filling, I whipped in a mixer about a 1/2 cup of heavy cream and 1/4 cup of sugar until stiff peaks formed.

Once cupcakes are cooled, put vanilla pudding and cream filling into two separate pastry bags with a round or star tip. Place tip into the X on the top of the cupcake and fill each to top.

For the chocolate coating I made a ganache of heavy cream and chocolate chips over a double boiler. I spooned the ganache over the cupcakes and put into the fridge to set.

The cupcakes were very good. As I said before, I recommend you fill the batter pretty close to the top as they do not rise very much. But the texture is nice and the flavor is good for a yellow cake. The pudding filling ones were not too bad, my mother loved them. Of course my favorite was the cream filled ones. In the future I would make a bigger X in the top of each cupcake and put in more filling. But the chocolate ganache coating on the top I think made the cupcakes what they are. I could have just made chocolate frosting, but this gave them a real Boston cream pie taste.

No pastry class this week. The school is on their Spring Break, so we will resume with class 5 next Monday.