Fourth of July - Dress Rehearsal

With my baking partner out of town this weekend I decided to test a recipe for chocolate cupcakes we expect to make for the upcoming 4th of July Holiday.

Or will we? 

My vision:  A very, very dense chocolate cupcake filled with raspberry curd and topped with the same amazing lemon (now raspberry) mascarpone cream frosting we used in the last post.

We'll finish with molded sugar decorations.

The cupcake recipe is a chocolate sour cream bundt cake recipe from William Sonoma.

Can cupcakes be made from a bundt cake recipe?

That's why I'm testing it because nothing says

FAIL,

more than a group of people biting into a brick of dough and trying to act like it's good.

For the cake recipe click here:  Lick The Bowl Good Blog

I picked Monica's recipe because it was the only one I found that combined several types of chocolate and it seemed to be dense enough to work with the curd filling and rich frosting. 

For making cupcakes from the receipe, here's what I learned:



First batch. I filled  the cups 2/3 of the way full
and let bake for 22 minutes.



They fell immediately coming out of the oven.
No big deal but the next batch I decided to fill the liners to
the brim.



these I let bake for 25-28 minutes. 
I cut the recipe in half and still yielded 18 large cupcakes.

Next, the raspberry curd filling.  Toay I used a recipe from Martha Stewart, but I wish I had used the recipe from the previous post.

It's nearly fail safe.  To make raspberry curd, puree one cup of raspberries, strain and fold into the lemon curd.  Because the puree is adding a liquid, I would add a little extra corn starch to the recipe.  Mine was slightly runny and did not set up as well as I wanted.  Boo. But that's ok, because this is only the dress rehearsal.

Click here for the lemon curd recipe: There Goes the Cupcake as well did the wonderful mascarpone frosting.

I added a small amount of red food coloring and finished with molded sugar decorations:

The results were a very intense, dense chocolate cupcake with  raspberry curd and equally rich mascarpone frosting. 

It. Is. Rich.  For reals. 

Will it make it to our 4th of July party in a few weeks?

I'm not sure. I need to confer with MM after he returns. These take some time to make and on a day when there are many things to do, it could be too complicated?  

 

Maybe we should make a pie?