Classic flavor combination: chocolate & raspberry. Who doesn’t love that? Um, if you don’t, then just go away. JUST KIDDING! I know, it ain’t for everybody. But for peeps like my friend Glenda, those flavors rock her world. So guess what cute little Glenda got for her birthday? YOU GOT IT! A 24 karat diamond ring. NOT!

She got something even better: Chocolate cupcakes filled with Raspberry preserves and topped with a Raspberry American Buttercream. FROM ME! Simple as pie. And just as delicious. Delicious like Buttermilk pie. I love Buttermilk pie. Maybe I should make some. And why am I talking about Buttermilk pie in a Chocolate & Raspberry cupcakes post?

Once you make your cupcakes let them cool well. As with all cakes, let cakes cool well before you cut/slice into them. It allows for clean cuts. If you’re just starving and don’t need clean cuts – or your OCD doesn’t make you desire clean cuts – then feel free and cut your cake up before they cool. Me? Me need clean cuts.

Now this is VERY IMPORTANT: you MUST use a tourne knife. YOU MUST! Jusssst kidding. You don’t need a tourne knife. It’s just that’s the sharpest knife I found when taking equipment to my dad’s house. So now it’s the sharpest knife in his kitchen. In his condo for the matter. Probably in his neighborhood. We seem to have a no-sharp-knife conundrum in this here island.

So I’m using a tourne knife. Point is, use a small knife. I go by the general rule: small item, small knife, large item, large knife. As I said, it’s a general rule in my rule book and not written in stone. But chances are using a Chef knife for this, besides cumbersome, could be dangerous. Unless you’re a badass like Iron Chef Sakai and can do the following with a simple Chef knife or Japanese slicer:

AMAZING!

With a sharp knife cut into your cupcakes in a circular motion and at an angle. Ideally you will get a cute little cone of cake that easily pops out. You don’t HAVE to make a cone, you can go in straight, skipping the angle, but removing the cake won’t be as easy and may result in more of a mess and cake loss than necessary.

I like the cone. It comes out quick and clean. (Remember my need for clean cuts?) Besides, cutting the cone comes quite easy given I’ve blanched like 8976 pounds of Roma tomatoes. But what do blanched tomatoes have to do with this? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. Am I easily distracted or what? Oh look a squirrel!

Once your cute little cone is out, cut off the tip of the cone to create a flat sided “lid.” This is your lid after filling your cupcake. This lid is totally optional given you can always cover it all with frosting. Especially if you’re piping it into a swirl of some sort. But I think you end up with way too much frosting that might take away from the role of your filling. Also, if you want a smoother frosting layer, you will achieve more balance and smoothness with the top on. Basic engineering peeps.

What do you do with the cut off cone tips? Two ideas. Eat them or save them and make Rum Balls or Cake Pops. More on those in the future.

Once you’ve hollowed out a space for your filling, well, go ahead and fill it. Cover it. And voila! Chocolate Cupcakes w/Raspberry filling and Raspberry Buttercream.

Just kidding! If using a filling from berries that have seeds, like Raspberries, I do recommend you STRAIN it to remove the seeds. Just an added detail of refinement. Which proves difficult in my dad’s kitchen given he had no sieve. Or cheesecloth. Or pantyhose. Yes, I asked him if he had any pantyhose. He did not.

Thankfully.Now here’s a tip from the culinary world: work assembly line style. What does this mean? I don’t know. Ask Henry Ford, he invented the system. I think.

No, really. When you’re making hundreds of things in a kitchen, you quickly learn that if you don’t work smart, fast, and efficiently, your butt’s outta there. Eventually it becomes second nature.

So instead of cutting ONE cupcake, then cutting off the tip, then filling with preserves, then covering with lid, then piping on frosting on ONE cupcake before proceeding to cupcake numero DOS, you need to first lay out your cakes. Then cut the cone off of all of them. Then cut the tip off of all the cones.

Then fill out ALL the cupcakes.

Then cover all the cupcakes with their lids.

Then frost.

I said FROST! Oh wait. Gotta make the frosting!

Remember, working assembly line style like us professionals will likely take you HALF the time you would take if doing them individually. And I use the term “us professionals” VERY, VERY loosely.

And speaking of loosely, time for everybody’s favorite: FROSTING! Or is it ICING? Hmmm… I smell a research project. One I will give for my students to research and me to take all credit for. Not that it won’t come from Wikipedia and Google results given that’s all today’s kids use as “References.”

So to make the basic American Buttercream take softened unsalted butter and powdered sugar and mix until smooth. Quanitites depend on how soft or stiff you want it. This frosting uses a LOT of powdered sugar. But it’s delish. You can also add vanilla for added flavor and use heavy cream to thin it out some. Play with it.

With this one I added Raspberry preserves. I did add a smidgeon of Raspberry extract but barely any ’cause I wasn’t liking the flavor. It was cheap supermarket extract so skip that. Just add more preserves. But remember, if too soft or hot – like it is in Puerto Rico – it maye need more sugar to stiffen it up a bit. Once your frosting is well blended and you’ve achieved the desired consistency, frost those raspberry filled chocolate puppies!

Can you tell if I’m right or left handed by the direction of my swirl?

I can. AND OH MY GOSH! OMG! OMG! OMG does that bottom cupcake stepping out of line bother anyone other than me? This picture and that out of line cupcake keeps me up at night. Dammit!

But yeah. there you have it. Chocolate cupcakes filled with Raspberry preserves and topped with Raspberry Buttercream.

¡Felíz cumpleaños Glenda! These are waaaaaaaaay better than one of these:

Trust me.

***The cupcakes will be made in your dreams.

How Meryl Streep Nailed Her – Page 1 – The Daily Beast

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Funny thing, when I lived in NYC, Buttercup was a block away from the restaurant I worked at and about 20 blocks from my apartment. Not a good idea to have that on my walks home from work. Let’s just say, been there and done that a few too many times. Loved it! Their traditional Banana Pudding rocked as did their German Chocolate and their Sour Cream Spice cupcakes. Anyone who knows me knows that German Chocolate cake is by far my favorite cake. Ever. Seriously. EVER!

The cake is basically a plain vanilla cake (butter, sugar, eggs, flour, leavener) which gets Caramel swirled into the recipe. Um, hello?! Knee-buckling deliciousness! This added so much flavor, moisture and richness to the cakes. On a side note: anyone else get as annoyed as I do when the cupcake liner folds up a bit? Argh! Yes, these are the things that keep me up at night. So sad.

Okay, moving on. So once baked if you’re awesome like me (never said I was humble) out come these golden brown orbs of of caramelly goodness. I’m guessing the caramel contributed to the sturdiness of each cupcake ’cause they were quite firm. But still soft and moist.

Seriously. Add a slab of butter and these are good by themselves. This cake recipe would work very well if you just wanted to throw a simple syrup on it, maybe with some Don Q rum mixed in, or a simple sugar glaze.

But.

Raise your hand if you want some frosting. Raising both hands over here! So let’s make some Brown Sugar Caramel.

Well that looks quite brown and boring. Sure, it’s caramel. Sure, it’s sweet. Sure, it has awesome flavor. But BOOOORING looking. Unless you decide to start playing around with it. But who’s silly enough to just play with caramel? Or who’s silly enough to add a dab of caramel on top of a still warm cupcake and let it melt and eat it so fast you had no time to take a picture? Um. Not me! I would never do that. Ever.

Once cooled, you whip it up with some – are you sitting down – more sugar. Yes. Add some Powdered/10X sugar and continue to whip and add and whip and add until you like the consistency. Nice. Insulin shocked yet? You’ll be fine. After a week or two. Just kidding. It only takes three days to wake up from the sugar coma. Maybe four. Okay, five days TOPS!

Once you’ve whipped for a while you’ll see the color fades quite a lot and it gets quite thick. But no worries. If the consistency is too thick, just THIN it out with HEAVY CREAM. Get it? “Thin” it out with “Heavy Cream?” Anyone else amused by this other than me? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller? (RIP John Huges! You rocked!)

And MY OH MY! What a lovely white KitchenAid bowl I have in the picture above, right? Where does one get a beautiful white KitchenAid bowl like that?

Um… nowhere. Do they even exist? I’m just too lazy sometimes to use the big KitchenAid mixer so I use my handy dandy KitchenAid Hand Mixer more often than most. Easy to clean and works great for simple frostings. I do love my Kitchen Aid, which I lovingly refer to him as my Alien. Like from the movie Alien. Anyone else think it looks like the Alien from Alien or am I revealing WAY too much here? But yeah, the Alien, and the bowl, and the attachments are sometimes just too big for a bit of frosting. So use your hand mixer. They rock!

Still with me? Didn’t scare you away? Cool. These were interesting. Next time I will try something different with the Brown Sugar Caramel Frosting ’cause it’s a bit too cloyingly sweet for me. Definitely needed more Heavy Cream to thin it out and make it creamier and softer. But as is, they are fine. To some peeps, the sweeter and more sugar, the better. But in the ironies of the many ironies of my ironic life, I am so not a huge fan of overly sweet stuff. Go figure.

In related pee-inducing-laughter-news, Anthony Bourdain posted a hilarious account of what he titled  “A drive by shooting” telling us about his recent encounter with Sandra Lee, someone he has, let’s just say, spoken “about” in the past.

Without further ado it is now officially Cocktail time!

Extra & totally off-topic: What inspired this posts’ subject/title header? It’s from a movie. I love movies! An oldie, but classic. Who doesn’t love an oldie? Yet it’s not so old it was in color. Any ideas? Guesses?

Okay… here it is… AFTER the jump…

Well, what better way than to experiment yourself. Stay tuned!

At home I don’t fry them. I do them the second best possible way to eat Chickpeas: roasted in the oven. Or is the second best way to eat Chickpeas in Hummus Form? Hmmm… Okay. Tied for second best way to eat Chickpeas: oven roasted!

The easiest way to do them is just a little (or a lot) of olive oil, salt, and FRESHLY ground pepper. Toss it all together and roast. Usually I do it anywhere from 450F-500F in a convection oven, stirring a few times through the cooking process. For how long? Until it’s done! (Don’t you hate when people say that?) I bake them until they’ve shrunk a bit, start looking golden brown, and are nice and crispy. This requires tasting every now and then. Torture, I know.

Some times, in addition to salt and FRESHLY ground pepper (notice a message here about Pepper?), I will add garlic powder, onion powder, cumin, chili powder, and sweet and smoky Paprikas (both types). I looooove the smoky Paprika. It almost makes me feel like I’m in Spain. Almost I said. Then I toss it all with olive oil and again into a high heat oven.

Once they look like they’ve shrunk and are golden brown and pretty darn crisp, they’re done. I eat them as a snack 99.99% of the times. But they also rock as garnish for soups or salads. You will notice that some do not get all the way crisp. Either leave them in oven longer or just enjoy the different levels of crispiness.

Can you see they’re GOLDEN?

BROWN?

And DELICIOUS?

They were!!!

From the NY Times Magazine – and in spirit of the revival of all things Julia Child (she’s always been alive with me…not just now with Julie & Julia) – is a fun and informative:

Timeline – The Origins of the Cooking Show – Interactive Feature – NYTimes.com.

¡Buen provecho!

Just wrote a quick post on Vaca Frita @ Plaza Las Americas on:

www.moncheoPR.com

¡Buen provecho!

I may not agree with every single point of his. I even tend to believe things aren’t as bad with the state of how we eat. Regardless, I can read Michael Pollan’s FOREVER.

First time I read him was when my old employer, Chipotle, gave us Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma.” Nice gift, I know. Here is what I just read in the NY Times that motivated me to share it with whoever reads me. Yes, the 5 of you who read me, I thank thee. I recommend his books.

Click here to read: “Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch” by Michael Pollen as posted in the NY Times. Enjoy!

More on my thoughts on it after I watch it. Meanwhile, do yourself a favor and go read:

1. Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser
2. The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan