Yup. I'm up. It's raining, and I'm sitting in the living room with Saru-chan and reading the Hyperbole and a Half archive (I'm here). I woke up at 1 a.m. and I am fine, but might almost be tired enough to sleep soon.
Also, I made cake.
A buckeye cake.
Yesterday I intended to make chocolate cupcakes with a peanut butter ball inside, sort of like a reese's peanut butter cup only in cupcake form. I made the chocolate peanut spread from Smitten Kitchen and a fairly standard buckeye recipe. However, I made one of the chocolate cupcakes from the Cupcake Bakeshop, and that was where things went all wrong. I crammed her batter into 12 cupcakes instead of 14. I put the peanut butter balls in them and they might have wanted more liquid, because what is OK for candy is not really OK for something heated to 350 degrees for 20 minutes. They also either sunk to the bottom or were pushed into the batter too much.
Of course, I don't know that those are the reasons the cupcakes went all wrong. I've been out of baking powder for over a week. Now, if you don't bake frequently, then this really isn't a big deal. I found a substitution "recipe" and made up enough to tide me over for a couple of weeks. The substitute involved cream of tartar, baking soda and cornstarch, all things I had in relative abundance. It seems to work well enough, but I have no idea if it is equivalent to double acting baking powder or single.
Suffice to say that between that and a temperature issue, I had a batch of cupcakes that didn't dome but also spread out to cover most of the unsprayed surface of the cupcake pan. As they weren't going to come out pretty, I now have dessert for Chris and I for the week (or two). And buckeye cake became my second choice.
I use the Nestle buckeye cake recipe (with a few minor changes), because I happened to have the premelted chocolate on hand (and regular baking chocolate squares if I had run out). This cake doesn't involve leavening, so there is no worry about it rising too much.
I added a little extra butter (2 tablespoons) to the basic buckeye recipe I had made earlier in the day and a little over a 1/4 teaspoon of almond extract to make the buckeye "peanut butter filling" more pliable. I couldn't make the one in the Nestle recipe, because Sunday was a day of using stuff up. I ran out of confectioners sugar and had to break open another box of unsalted butter.
I haven't had heavy cream in a while, and made the chocolate peanut spread with the idea of using it like a frosting.
Chocolate Peanut Butter Ganache
(I eyeballed this, so consider the measurements below as a grain of salt)
1/3 cup chocolate peanut spread
1/4-1/3 cup semisweet chocolate chips
1/4 cup whole milk
Heat the ingredients over a double boiler on medium heat, stirring frequently. As the chocolate chips melt, whisk (or any other stirring implement - I was lazy and used my "not an offset, but meant for cake decorating" spatula) vigorously until the milk is completely incorporated. If it is not easily spreadable (you want it to be somewhere between peanut butter and hot fudge sauce in consistency), add additional whole milk a tablespoon at a time until it is as liquidy as you would like it.
Theoretically I could have made it with the chocolate peanut butter spread from the store, but my recipe of the smitten kitchen used extra peanut oil, because it felt very hard to spread. With a store bought spread, you might need extra milk.
Because I'm not going to cut the cake to take a picture of it, instead have a picture of my husband before we went to see Harry Potter yesterday posing with Snuffles.
The sweater was not worn out of the house, because it was 80. But it did get to see the movie with us.
