Yesterday was my 2nd wedding anniversary, so I figured this would be a good week to share with you some cupcakes I made for another wedding.

Matt's brother got married in late June and, as you may have seen, our wedding present to his brother and his wife was the wedding cake.  Well, not exactly.  Instead of a cake, they decided to serve tons of mini cupcakes.

Who knew that turning a classic cocktail comprised of just a few simple ingredients into a little doughnut would be such a hit?  Apparently it was - my Italian Old Fashioned Doughnuts won 1st place from the judges as well as the Theo Prize for embodying the spirit of the competition (no pun intended) at Sunday's Brooklyn Booze Experiment.

Beer and pretzels: a classic combination and for good reason.  There's nothing quite like the pairing of a refreshing, smooth, and slightly pint and the salty, satisfying crunch of pretzels.  Recently, I've been seeing this pair pop up outside of the bar, and these cupcakes aren't the first instance of it.

My first experience with beer and pretzels in a sweet was NYC's own Liddabit Sweets' beer and pretzel caramels.  Made with a blend of Brooklyn Brewery's Brown Ale and East India Pale Ale, this treat is the perfect amalgamation of pretzels suspended in a sweet, salty, and beer-y base.  (Unbeknownst to me until just yesterday, Liddabit also makes something called the Slurtle, which are the same caramels topped with chocolate.)  And just the other day I saw a recipe for beer, pretzel, and chocolate marshmallows.  Clearly the combination is a good one otherwise it wouldn't be popping up in so many places.

This one's been in the works for a while.  I've gotten a number of requests over the years for an egg-free cupcake but I never bothered with it because the demand wasn't all that great.  But last month, I had a reason to finally give it a shot.


Let me back up a bit.  Egg-free cake?  Why not fully vegan?  A lot of people I know who are vegetarian don't eat eggs, but they're ok with milk and other dairy.  And those were the folks requesting egg-free cakes.   But I figured that if I were going to make an egg-free cake, I may as well just go fully vegan as I had also gotten a few requests for vegan cake recipes.

Well, all my hard work paid off - I won 1st prize from both the judges and the audience at the Brooklyn Chocolate Experiment!  My winning entry was a Thai Chili-Lime Dark Chocolate Ice Cream Cone: 70% dark chocolate coconut milk ice cream infused with Kaffir lime leaves and Thai bird chilies served in a hand-rolled cocoa-ginger-Thai basil tuile cone and topped with crushed coconut milk peanuts.

The guys who brought us the Brooklyn Beer Experiment (which I entered) and the Brooklyn Cheese Experiment (which I missed because I was on my honeymoon) are back with the next installment in the wonderful Brooklyn Food Experiment series – The Brooklyn Chocolate Experiment!


The categories for this one have been expanded – food has been split up into sweet and savory – and, of course, I have already secured my spot in the sweet category. [I have an idea of what I’m going to make, but it needs some testing over the coming weeks.] There’s an impressive lineup of judges, and as in previous experiments, there will be awards selected both by the panel of judges and the audience.

The Brooklyn Chocolate Experiment is on Sunday November 15 from 1 pm - 5 pm at The Bell House in Brooklyn. The previous two experiments sold out, so make sure to get your tickets in advance and to get there on time.

To my NYC readers – please come and support me! Your $20 ticket gets you lots of great food and excellent homebrews and an added bonus is that a portion of the proceeds will go to ovarian cancer research. You can get tickets here or from the box office at The Bell House.

Sorry I've been so absent...life has been really hectic and I have lots to share, which I'll get around to doing next week.

In the meantime, I'll tide you over with these double chocolate cupcakes. So, you know how I really don't like chocolate cake? Well, I think these cupcakes have made me a believer. I've tried out dozens of chocolate cake/cupcake recipes over the past few years but I've hated them all. This time, I decided to just use my own recipe and the result was chocolate cupcake perfection. I'm not quite sure how it happened, but somehow it did, and the result is a moist, not too dense but not too light, slightly rich, and perfectly chocolatey cupcake. I just might have to make them again.

There’s really not much of a story on these cupcakes – they were made as per a friend’s request for his 30th birthday. I sent him an email listing all the possible flavors of cake and frosting I could make. He picked white chocolate, vanilla, lemon, and strawberry, and I decided on white chocolate cupcakes with strawberry frosting.

Most white chocolate cakes and cupcakes are very dense (which is why I generally dislike them), so I made sure to make these cupcakes light and soft (yogurt is my new best friend when making cupcakes). The frosting is a standard Swiss meringue buttercream with a thick strawberry reduction added at the end, and the cupcakes were finished off with half of a locally grown strawberry that is small and ruby red and actually tastes like a strawberry.

In case you couldn’t tell from the lack of a single cookie recipe on here to date, I’m not really a cookie person. I don’t have much of a sweet tooth (but you might not know it from all the cupcakes I make - and then give away), but, if given a choice between a cookie and a cupcake, I’m going for the cupcake, and pie beats out both of those. Sure, I’ll eat a cookie every now and then, but only if it’s a really good cookie – meaning that it is moist, chewy, and contains lots of stuff – chocolate chips, dried fruit, maybe some nuts, whatever, but there needs to be a lot of them in the cookie.

I’ve wanted to buy an ice cream maker for almost a year now, and I finally bought one last Friday for the low price of $20! (Thanks to David Lebovitz for the tip about the sale at Amazon – apparently they sold out of them really quickly, so I’m glad I was able to get my hands on one.)


One of my favorite flavors of ice cream is (and always has been) mint chip, but these days I just can’t eat it if it’s green and the mint flavor is distinctly artificial. All-natural mint ice cream (made with real mint) is the way to go, and it’s even better with chunks of good quality chocolate in it.

A few days ago, I wanted to make cupcakes and since I was being stared down by the carton of buttermilk in my fridge, I decided to revisit red velvet cake, albeit with a few revisions in mind. 

Love and death: a weighty theme for this little food blog of mine, isn’t it? Don’t worry, I promise it will lead to a recipe.
Love and death are a popular and enduring pair: amongst their many appearances are their unbilled star turn in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, in Sara Teasdale’s poetry of the early 1900’s, and in indie rock from the early 2000’s (in particular, on the debut album of one of my favorite bands, The Stills). It’s fairly easy to see how these two are linked; some people will do anything for love (just look at what Juliet did).

This glaze is part of Love and Death by Chocolate.

This chocolate mousse is a part of Love and Death by Chocolate, but it's also great on its own.

This meringue is piped into discs for Love and Death by Chocolate. You can also pipe it into small spirals to make meringue kisses.

This ganache is a part of Love and Death by Chocolate.

These brownie rounds are part of Love and Death by Chocolate. You can also pour this batter into a small pan, or double the recipe for an 8"x8" pan.

I made these mini cupcakes last week - they were supposed to be taken to my department's holiday party, but I ended up giving them to the bf and his coworkers because I ended up going home due to my not feeling so hot (I''m totally better now, save the for minor congestion).

The cupcakes are simple vanilla cupcakes, recipe courtesy of Amy Sedaris. I don't have the recipes for the frostings with me, but all I did was grind up candy canes in a spice grinder and replace some of the confectioners sugar in the frosting with the candy cane powder (the pink frosting is a vanilla cream cheese frosting, the chocolate frosting is a cocoa frosting made with Ghirardelli cocoa powder). After piping the frosting onto the cupcakes, I topped them off with a sprinkling of crushed candy cane.