coffee cupcake experiment

Sunday was supposed to be a productive day, filled with writing, and coffee.....mmmm coffee cupcakes. My brain, such as it is. I did manage to make it to evening though before baking. Anyways, I still had some brown sugar frosting left over from apricot cake, and this stuff is so amazing it deserved a better fate than being slowly eaten from the bowl. By me.

I've read some coffee cupcake recipes before...they usually ask for buttermilk, or coffee liqueur or espresso powder, all of which I didn't have. I got all determined and decided to make a simple coffee cupcake recipe. I started with basic chocolate cupcake style, using flour and cocoa powder. Then I substituted half the usual liquid (milk) for extremely strongly brewed Starbucks breakfast blend, which is what I had on hand. The batter turned out drier than I expected, so I upped both the coffee and milk amounts originally anticipated. I filled the filled the cups 3/4 full as usual.

Now, I didn't give much thought to bake time. I went with the usual 350 degrees, ~22 minute approach. I took the pans out after 22 minutes and the cupcakes looked good, and the knife came out pretty clean (yes, I don't have toothpicks). However, after removing them to the cooling rack, I noticed the domes deflating! The cupcakes were shrinking and peeling away from their wrappers. I picked one up and broke it in half out of curiosity, and to my horror found the batter was hardly cooked. OH SHIT I said. I frantically started putting the cakes back into the pan (something I've never done before) and replaced them in the oven. Now I was in completely foreign territory. I had no idea how much longer to leave them in for, or if this whole slightly cooled and returned to oven thing was ok.

This is the half cooked cupcake. You may notice that half is gone. It was half cooked, but not half ..yummy.

Anyways, I ended up returning the cupcakes to the oven for ten more minutes, and they were better but not great. I left my second batch in for 35 minutes, which seems bizarre to me for a cupcake, but there you go. I have no idea really what happened. (I did double check that my oven was at 350.)

The flavor of the cupcakes were definitely mild. The cocoa powder was great, but the coffee flavor wasn't very strong. Matt, a co-worker, said 'There's coffee in this?' I guess it was more apparent to me since I was looking for it. The frosting definitely stole the show.


I need to work on this some more before posting a recipe, but in the meantime, try this recipe from Cupcake Bakeshop.