Last night we enjoyed the rest of our faux bubble-squeak creation. As you might have guessed, it was even better the second day–everything got a bit browner and crunchier. Along with it we gorged on a cheese plate (Humbolt Fog, Point Reyes Blue, and some French muenster–it had been a long time since I’d had muenster and MAN did it taste good) and this lovely creation:
Recipe by me, cooked by my new lovely intern. I’d been thinking about setting up an internship for awhile (when I finished cooking school it was restaurant internships or nothing, I went with nothing but would have loved to see recipe work and food writing up close and personal) and my broken-hand syndrome forced the issue.
But the real story here happened before dinner, when Ernie baked cupcakes for his preschool to celebrate his birthday, TODAY! He is five. Five, it ends up, is old enough to pretty much bake cupcakes by yourself–as long as you have someone to deal with the oven and even out the batter in the cups. Oh, and read the “instructions” as Ernie calls them. In terms of batter-licking, though, he required absolutely no help whatsoever.
With some direction, he measured and mixed the dry ingredients, poured in the wet, and mixed it up. He also measured and mixed the chocolatey royal icing we used as a glaze to help the sprinkles adhere and, of course, applied the sprinkles: “two kinds, Mama, I want two kinds of sprinkles.” Ask, my son, and you shall receive.
They turned out pretty darn cute, if I do say so myself.
If you want to make some egg- and dairy-free chocolate cupcakes that are super-moist and yummy, use the batter for this Amazon cake (bake them 20-25 minutes). It just may be the easiest cake to make in the world and I get raves every time I serve it. I stopped telling people how easy it is years ago and started just saying “thanks, yeah, isn’t it great?” We mixed up a triple batch and ended up with 45 cupcakes. We could have gotten to 48 with a bit more planning and measuring, but we only needed 42 (38 for school plus 4 for tonight–more on that tomorrow).
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