This week the Heavenly Bakers are making chocolate cupcakes. This was a five stage process: batter, ganache, soft sticky caramel, pecan topping and then composition. If you wanted to get through all the steps in one day it would take some thoughtful reading and planning. The ganache and sticky caramel have to heat, cook and cool before step 5 - composition. I needed to make them over a two-day process anyway, given some family commitments, so this didn't pose a challenge for me.
I was nervous about making these little beauties though. Funnily enough, it triggered all these memories from my childhood. When I was growing up, my mother was an excellent cook who always used fresh ingredients and made everything from first principles but she never baked or made sweets. She also was busy working and raising six children so she didn't ever teach us to cook. However, she never stopped us from using the kitchen or trying things out. In fact, I think she rather liked it as we grew older and we occasionally baked or even more rarely, made dinner. But I digress.
The very first thing I tried to make as a young person, many moons ago, was a sweet called chocolate caramel toffee turtles. They were made up of a toffee centre into which you stuck pecans for legs and chocolate for eyes and used chocolate for general decoration. I also remember them to be complete time-consuming failures. The caramel toffee never set hard enough, instead pooling into blobby bits of sticky stuff with pecans and chocolate oozing out everywhere. I'm not even sure anyone tried to eat them - and I probably had an awful lot of cleaning up to do. What I did learn is that some things are hard to make if you've never seen anyone do it, and just reading instructions is not always enough. Furthermore, some things actually take precision - like baking and turning sugar into a caramel or a toffee. Probably not the best project for a child to start cooking.
So fast forward through about 30 years of living out of home, reading lots of cookbooks, watching lots of cooking shows, doing and doing and doing lots of baking (not so much sweet making), then you'll meet the person facing her turtle toffee challenge.
First though, I made the batter, following the instructions I'm coming to love - mix the wet ingredients with the cocoa first (sour cream, eggs, and vanilla added to cocoa) until it makes a slightly lumpy batter.
Then the cocoa mixture it is added to the dry ingredients, which have been mixed in the stand mixer. The butter and cocoa mixture are added alternatively until fully mixed. Then batter progresses into the cupcake wrappers and into the oven. The batter makes 16 cupcakes.
On the next day I made the "mud" from the title - I thought at first the mud referred to a chocolate mud cake recipe. But no, the chocolate cupcakes are Rose-famous delicate and light as a feather. Nothing stodgy and muddy about the cupcake. The mud actually refers to the ganache - which is just good quality dark chocolate and heavy cream (with a bit of vanilla extract). As the Lindt dark chocolate isn't very sweet, the ganache is quite a strong and not a very child-friendly taste (but I love it).
In the spirit of long, rambly, memory driven posts....when I was 17 and first attending University I met a girl who became a kind of close acquaintance while we were at Uni and then I lost touch with her. Years later, I went to another University in Sydney to do my Master's degree and met her sister. I knew almost at once that they had to have been related as they shared a very unusual surname. This new friend, who became a close friend, went home and said "I've met so and so and she says she went to Uni with you, do you remember her?" and her sister Katy said "Yes, I remember her. She loves chocolate". I still laugh thinking about that. Down through the years, and across time, it is remembered that I love chocolate.
Back in the present, I then made the soft sticky caramel. And it worked perfectly - at least perfectly to me. Delia Smith taught me how to make caramel years ago through a cooking show and a set of cookbooks. Here's a link to her current media on making caramel. Her videos were better and more fun. She added some fantastic out-takes on the end of the videos showing the caramel going all pear shaped. Which I loved, given the memory of the great turtle toffee disaster. Anyway, no disasters now. The Caramel worked and was a good taste, a good consistency and I followed Rose's advice and put the caramel and the ganache in disposable piping bags for the composition part of the cupcake cycle.
The pecans are toasted in the oven for about seven minutes and this didn't end up causing much colour change but did give them the nice toasty nut taste.
Composition is: piped ganache across the top of the cupcake, then pecans added into a head and legs shape, then caramel piped into the middle to make the start of the shell, then ganache piped on top of the caramel and then chocolate bits added to give the shell a bit of turtle-shell look. If you are careful and parsimonious with your caramel it doesn't need to ooze on the cupcake, but I rather like the oozing and did about half half.
In conclusion, I survived the revisiting of the Great Turtle Toffee Disaster of the 1970s. I loved these cakes, the combination of tastes in the ganache and caramel and pecans and the lovely light chocolate cupcake. But the downside is no one else in the family loved them. One child hates nuts. The other child didn't like the mud (dark chocolate ganache) and my husband just didn't love the combination, or the ganache.