Pumpkin Cupcakes with Brown Butter Frosting

In case you still have a hankering to make pumpkin cupcakes, I made another recipe. I don't know why Martha has two pumpkin recipes. Presumably, she has a lot of pumpkins in her pumpkin patch, which she harvests and cooks down and needs to use for something.

I have never been a big fan of pumpkin pie. While discussing Thanksgiving dinner with Melanee and George--in particular, pie--I learned that pumpkin pie is our least favorite of all pies. I love pumpkin bread, pumpkin bars, and pumpkin chocolate chip cookies, but I have never been a big fan of the custardy texture of pumpkin pie. I do not need it to feel like my Thanksgiving dinner has been a success. This recipe is not like pumpkin pie, just to put your mind at ease, if you, like me, do not like pumpkin pie.

This recipe is a bit more rustic than the last recipe. It calls for browned butter, which was something I had never made before.

These cupcakes are amazingly soft, and the brown butter gives them a kind of caramel flavor. It's a little different from the other pumpkin cupcake recipe, but equally delicious. Weeks later, one of the women I worked with said she continues to have dreams about the brown butter frosting.

Pumpkin-Brown Butter Cupcakes

1 1/2 sticks unsalted butter, room temperature, plus more for tins.

1 2/3 c. all-purpose flour, plus more for tins.

1/4 c. fresh sage leaves, cut into chiffonade (optional)

2 tsp. baking powder

1 tsp. salt

1/2 tsp. ground cinnamon

1/4 tsp. freshly grated nutmeg

1/8 tsp. ground cloves

1 c. canned pumpkin puree (not pie filling)

1 c. packed light brown sugar

1/2 c. granulated sugar

2 large eggs

Preheat oven to 325. Brush muffin tins with butter, dust with flour, tapping out excess. In a saucepan, melt butter over medium-low heat. Add sage, if desired, and continue to cook, swirling occasionally, until butter turns golden brown. Skim foam from top, and remove from heat. Pour into a bowl to stop the cooking, leaving behind any burned sediment behind; let cool.

Whisk together dry ingredients. In another bowl, whisk together pumpkin puree, both sugars, eggs, and brown-butter. Add flour mixture, and whisk until just combined.

Divide batter evenly among lined cups, filling each three-quarters full. Bake about 20 minutes. To finish, dip top of each cupcake in brown-butter icing, then turn over quickly and let set.

Brown Butter Icing

(makes 1 cup)

1 stick unsalted butter

2 c. sifted confectioners' sugar

2 tsp. pure vanilla extract

2 tbsp. milk, plus more if needed

Melt butter in a small saucepan over medium heat, swirling pan occasionally, until nut-brown in color, about 10 minutes. Remove from heat, and pour butter into a bowl, leaving any burned sediment behind.

Add confectioners' sugar, vanilla, and 2 tablespoons milk to brown butter; stir until smooth. If necessary, add more milk, a little at a time, just until icing is spreadable. Use immediately.

Pumpkin Patch Cupcakes and San Francisco

I think I need a new strategy with this blog. I feel like the five of you who read/follow my blog need to know that I am still baking the cupcakes. In fact, I have made a lot of cupcakes over the last few weeks. However, after baking them, decorating them, and giving them away, I seem to lack the energy/motivation to blog about them. But I don't want you to give up on me, so I am going to post this one about my most recent cupcakes/adventures in San Francisco and work my way backward. Stay tuned.

A few months ago, in an effort to connect to my Japanese American heritage, I decided to attend the National Council on Family Relations annual conference in San Francisco. Before the conference started, they had an event in which they screened a documentary called Children of the Camps, and toured Japantown, which is the Japanese district of San Francisco. The documentary features six people who were interred as children during World War II, who come together at a retreat to process their experiences related to the camps and the war.

When I told my mom I was going to San Francisco, she immediately wanted to go with me. It turns out, if you are fortunate enough to live in Las Vegas, you can fly to San Francisco and back for less than $100. If you live in Lubbock, it can cost you four times as much. When my parents decided to come along, I suggested my dad attend the pre-conference event with me. He thought it was a great idea.

The documentary was awesome. I now own a copy of it on DVD, if you would ever like to borrow it. It stimulated a lot of good conversation between me and my dad on the bus ride to downtown San Francisco where we first stopped to have lunch. We were offered 12 choices of lunch combos or bento, and were limited to chicken, beef, pork, ramen, or tempura, with a side dish of unagi or sashimi. That's right: Dad had to explain to miscellaneous family scientists from across the country that, with their lunch of chicken, they could choose between barbecued eel or an array of raw fish slabs.

Here I am outside the restaurant, posing next to the plastic food display.

After lunch, we were taken on a tour by a representative from the Japanese American Historical Society. Here she is in front of a monument to three generations of Japanese Americans.

One side represents issei, or the first generation, which would have been my great-grandparents. They were shown as immigrants settling in San Francisco. Another side showed nisei, which would have been my grandparents, and were represented by people in internment camps. Our tour guide, whose name I have already forgotten, is standing in front of the side representing sansei and beyond, meaning my dad's generation, my generation, and future generations. Interestingly, it is this panel that depicts people dressed in Japanese-style clothing, participating in obon. Apparently, in the 1980's, there was a cultural emphasis on reconnecting with one's roots, inspired, in part, by the book/miniseries Roots. Buildings in Japantown that reflect Japanese architecture were built during this period.

Here is a shot of my dad in front of the Peace Pagoda. It was given to San Francisco by the people of Osaka, Japan.

After the tour, we spent some time shopping. We hit the 100-yen store, where I bought a tie for Danny that appears to be a collection of letters that almost spell English words, but not quite. If I were to compare it to my other experiences of shopping for Japanese stuff, I would have to say that Japantown in San Francisco is better than Little Tokyo in LA, but still not very much like actual Japan.

The next day, we took the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) to San Francisco, where we took a cable car down to Fisherman's Wharf. Here are some helpful things we learned about travelling in San Francisco:

• Public transportation is expensive.
• Cable cars are not efficient.

We had clam chowder in sourdough bread bowls and fish 'n chips at a little stand, which we ate while standing up against a counter behind the stand.

Here is a shot of my parents near the beach. It was a pretty chilly day, and we saw no reason to get any closer to the water than that.

We did some shopping in Ghirardelli Square, which is named after the chocolate. However, we did not buy any chocolate. Instead, we bought a cupcake.

Here is a picture of the pretty box it came in.

It was Meyer lemon, which I have a recipe for in my Martha cookbook. It was beautiful and tasted great. In true Mom fashion, she had me go back into the store and buy a second cupcake. It was coconut, and it was also fantastic.

We took a walk along one of the piers and watched people poaching for crabs.

Then we took a cable car back toward the city, where we explored Bloomingdale's and saw Wicked. It was a great day!

The next day, we took a trip up the coast, shopped around in a little resort town called Half Moon Bay, and had some great seafood at a place called Sam's Chowder House. I bought another cupcake, but it was not as good. I have no pictures from my camera on this day, so I will have to get the ones my parents took.

I headed back to Lubbock and life on Friday, and on Saturday night, I made pumpkin patch cupcakes.

Because Martha is Martha, she couldn't possibly include a recipe for just plain pumpkin cupcakes. She had to add some degree of difficulty, so this recipe called for marzipan pumpkins. Marzipan is a sweet paste made out of almonds. It is malleable like fondant, and, according to Lorelei Gilmore, "it is a unique substance unto itself, like Velveeta or plutonium."

Here is my attempt at marzipan pumpkins. I dyed the marzipan orange with gel food color, and shaped it with my fingers. After I made about 16 of them, I sort of lost interest. I do not feel they added much to the overall taste of the cupcakes, and I didn't feel anyone at my ward Mix and Munch would miss not having them.

In all other aspects, they are just regular pumpkin cupcakes.

The recipe calls for cake flour, so they are very light and moist. They are perfect with cream cheese frosting.

They also have only brown sugar in them, which also makes them seem very rustic and fall-like.

Here they are, with and without the marizpan. What do you think, do they add to the cupcakes, or are they just unnecessary fluff?

Marble Cupcakes

The marble cupcakes were not the focus of my week this week. You see, I got to go to a wedding in San Antonio. Here is a shot of me with the bride, my friend Erin. The height difference makes for kind of an awkward picture. I'm pretty sure my head is not actually resting on her chest, but it was pretty late by the time that picture was taken, so, who knows.

When I started my doctoral program two plus years ago, there were four other students who started with me. Three of them were guys-all married, and the other one was a girl who was single like me. She met the man she would later marry toward the end of our first semester, after a comical series of bad dates, and knew, within a few weeks, that he was the man she wanted to spend the rest of her life with. I, on the other hand, have only a comical series of bad dates to show for the last two years, and about 20 cupcake recipes. But, as I have stated before, I am trying not to make this about my love life.

Anyway, Erin got married this weekend in San Antonio, and Kim, Martha, and I decided to go to it. We were all excited to be there to support Erin, and were looking for any excuse to leave Lubbock. Some of the highlights of the weekend included:

• A stop in Brady, TX on our way to San Antonio. Brady, by its own estimation, is considered the heart of Texas. However, the main drag of Brady consisted of two sketchy gas stations, a gym, and some sort of real estate/taxidermy hybrid business.
• The hotel fire alarm going off at 7:00 in the morning. The night before, Kim, while studying a map of our floor on the back of the hotel room door, commented on the instructions underneath, which said, "Should a fire break out, do NOT stay in your hotel room." Her comment was that anyone who needed to be told to leave a burning room may have deeper issues. She apologized profusely as we descended 11 flights of stairs and stood outside for less than ten minutes before they let us back in. On the plus side, since we were already downstairs, we decided to have breakfast, which included self-made Belgian waffles.
• Lots of college football. Our hotel room had two TV's, which meant we could watch two games at once. We watched Iowa vs. Northwestern and Texas vs. Central Florida in the morning, and Navy vs. Notre Dame in the afternoon while we got ready. We had a real struggle to tear ourselves away from the two TVs in the country club where they were married that were showing the last few minutes of the Oregon/Stanford game and the Alabama/LSU game so that we could be seated outside for the wedding. I think we all appreciated that a group of three women could enjoy so much college football.

It was a very nice wedding. Erin's family is some sort of Protestant religion, but her husband's family is Jewish, so the ceremony was a blending of several religious traditions, with their own flair added here and there.

Case in point, this was the mariachi band that played outside the ballroom before the reception started.

Here is a shot of Martha, me, Kim, Shannon, and Amber before the reception started. The wait staff was already serving margaritas and appetizers before the reception even got underway. The food was fabulous. The band was amazing! Their lead singer was a tiny, middle-aged white man who did everything from Outkast and Justin Timberlake to Journey and the B-52's, along with a lot of standards.

But, really, the highlight of my weekend was hanging out with Kim and Martha. We are all very busy people, and it was quite a luxury to get to spend three days together watching football and hunting for Snuggies. And they were nice enough to get me home in time to teach Relief Society on Sunday afternoon, which was where I served the marble cupcakes that were supposed to be the subject of this post.

Ironically, I did not take any pictures of these cupcakes. I made them before I left town, and froze them in anticipation of serving them to the girls in my Relief Society class on Sunday.

This is a good recipe. The marbling of the cake makes it not too rich.

Marble Cupcakes

1 3/4 c. cake flour, sifted

2 tsp. baking powder

1/2 tsp. salt

1/3 c. milk, room temperature

1/2 c. (1 stick) unsalted butter, room temperature

1 c. granulated sugar

3 large eggs, room temperature

1 tsp. pure vanilla extract

1/3 c. unsweetened Special Dark cocoa powder

1/4 c. boiling water

Confectioner's sugar, for dusting

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line standard muffin tins with paper liners. Sift together cake flour, baking powder, and salt. Combine milk and cream.

With an electric mixer on medium-high speed, cream butter and granulated sugar until pale and fluffy. Add eggs, one at a time, beating until each is incorporated, scraping down sides of bowl as needed. Beat in vanilla. Add flour mixture in three batches, alternating with two additions of milk mixture, and beating until combined.

To make chocolate batter, measure out 1 c. batter, and transfer to another bowl. Combine cocoa and the boiling water in a bowl. Stir into reserved 1 cup batter.

Fill prepared cups with alternating spoonfuls of vanilla and chocolate batter, filling each three-quarters full (I used a small cookie scoop, and did 2 vanilla and 1 chocolate for each cupcake). Run the tip of a paring knife or wooden skewer through batter in a figure eight motion to make swirls (I used a chopstick). Bake about 20 minutes.

To finish, dust with confectioners' sugar just before serving.

Unless you are running behind and can't remember where you put the confectioners' sugar you stored in your car three days earlier, and then you can serve them without.

Streusel Cupcakes

You never know how much you miss someone until they're gone.

Stephanie went to Scandanavia for ten days in celebration of an important milestone birthday. I missed her. I spent a lot of time in my apartment staring at my laundry.

In an effort to convey to her how much I missed her, and to wish her a happy birthday, I made some cupcakes. My life is turning into that Jack Handey fuzzy memory that goes something like this: "My grandpa used to measure things in terms of cows. If you asked him how big something was, he'd say, 'it's about the size of a small cow.' Or if you asked him how long something would take, he'd say, 'about as long as it would take a cow to drive over here.'" I guess what I'm saying is that I'm finding that the answer to every question in my life or the life of anyone else I know is cupcakes. Sometimes it really works. Other times...

Streusel cupcakes were my effort to give Stephanie a taste of Europe right here in Texas. I don't know if it actually resembled anything European, but being the great friend she is, Stephanie humored me anyway. This is why I miss her so much when she leaves town.

Streusel Cupcakes

Makes 24

2 1/2 c. all-purpose flour

1/2 tsp. baking soda

1 1/4 tsp. baking powder

1/2 tsp. coarse salt (I used sea salt)

1/2 c. plus 2 tablespoons (1 1/4 sticks) unsalted butter, room temperature

1 c. sugar

3 large eggs

1 1/2 tsp. pure vanilla extract

1 1/4 c. sour cream

Preheat oven to 350. Line muffin tins with baking cups. Whisk together flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt. Cream butter and sugar until pale and fluffy. Add eggs, one at a time, beating until each is incorporated, scraping down sides of bowl as needed. Stir in vanilla by hand. Add flour mixture and sour cream, stir until just combined. Divide batter evenly among lined cups. Sprinkle half the topping over cupcakes, pressing it into the batter. Sprinkle evenly with remaining topping. Bake, rotating tins halfway through, until golden brown and a cake tester inserted in centers comes out clean, about 20 minutes. Transfer tins to wire racks to cool completely before removing cupcakes (I don't have wire racks. I cool mine on my counter). To finish, drizzle with milk glaze.

Streusel Topping

2 1/4 c. all-purpose flour

3/4 c. packed dark-brown sugar

2 1/4 tsp. ground cinnamon

3/4 tsp. coarse salt

1/2 c. plus 2 tablespoons (1 1/4 sticks) unsalted butter, room temperature

Whisk together flour, brown sugar, cinnamon, and salt; cut in the butter using a pastry blender, your fingertips, or two table knives until combined (I used knives) but still crumbly. Refrigerate 30 minutes before using.

Milk Glaze

1 1/2 c. confectioners' sugar, sifted

3 tablespoons milk

Whisk together ingredients until smooth. Use immediately.

Red Velvet Cupcakes

Some facts about red velvet cake:

• It is thought to be a Southern food. However, during the 1920's, it was a signature dessert at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York. There was a popular urban legend/chain letter about a woman who asked for the recipe and was billed a large amount, similar to the Neiman Marcus cookie urban legend.
• Although most recipes call for red food coloring, the red color is supposed to come from the chemical reaction of vinegar and buttermilk in the recipe.
• You can also use beets to dye it red.
• Wikipedia credits its resurgence in popularity in recent years to it being featured in the movie Steel Magnolias, where it is the flavor of the groom's cake, which is shaped like an armadillo.

I have made red velvet cupcakes and red velvet homemade Oreos using a mix many times. In fact, I made red velvet cupcakes later that week with my friend Hannah for our ward Halloween party. However, this was my first opportunity to make it from scratch. The occasion? My friend Kim defended her dissertation the Wednesday before Halloween, and red velvet cupcakes are her favorite.

Here is a picture of me, Kim (on the left) and Martha, at a wedding in San Antonio.

Here's the recipe. It's pretty darn good. I made it with cream cheese frosting, even though Wikipedia says it is traditionally frosted with a butter roux or "flour frosting". I can't imagine how that could be good.

Some thoughts about this recipe:

• It uses a lot of red food coloring.
• The cupcakes are not as red as the ones you make from a mix.
• Think about those two. Disturbing, isn't it?
• Despite the cupcakes being more maroon than red, they were a hit. This may have something to do with the fact that Kim is a diehard Virginia Tech fan, and maroon happens to be one of their colors.
• Their other color is orange. I had a lot of orange sprinkles that I bought for Halloween.
• Its kind of weird to make someone cupcakes and decorate them in the colors of one university when you are celebrating their graduation from another university.
• Texas Tech's colors are red and black.
• I also have black sprinkles.

Speaking of sprinkles, when Hannah and I made cupcakes that week, I brought over all of the sprinkles I have collected. There were a lot. I am starting to think that, perhaps, my friends need to stage an intervention. Now that Kim is officially a doctor, maybe she'll intervene on my behalf.