Texas Chocolate Sheet Cake

 Texas sheet cake.  Why do they call it "Texas" sheet cake?  I have no idea.  One thought is that it may be called that because it makes enough cake to feed the entire state of Texas.  I wish I was kidding.  Might want to halve this recipe unless you're planning on going up a pant size.

What you'll need:
- 2 cups of flour
- 2 cups of sugar
-1/4 tsp salt
- 4 heaping tablespoons of cocoa.  If you're feeling fancy use the dutch process fancy pants kind.  If you're me use Hershey's.
- 1/2 tablespoon instant coffee grounds
- 1/2 cup buttermilk
- 1 cup boiling water
- 2 beaten eggs
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 1 sweet dinosaur cupcake pan (optional)

Let's get crackin.

First things first, boil your water so it's ready to go.  Simple enough.

Ballin'.  Alrighty, now in a mixing bowl stir together your flour, sugar and salt.

Here's where things get serious.  Melt TWO sticks of butter in a medium sized pot.  Oh, be still my heart.

 

To the melted butter, add your cocoa and coffee.  Quirky fact: adding instant coffee to your chocolate cake/chocolate chip cookies will make Hershey's cocoa taste more rich.  See?  Learning all kinds of things today aren't we.

 

Now, add the boiling water to the chocolate/butter mixture.

Take a sniff.  Die a little.

Let this boil for about 30 seconds, then turn off the heat.  Pour the chocolate on top of your flour, and stir to combine.  You'll want to hang out a bit and let that cool down.

Forgive my yellow bowl, it does not realize what it does to pictures.

While that's cooling off, measure out your buttermilk in a measuring cup.  Add the baking soda, vanilla and eggs and whisk it around to combine.

If your flour/chocolate has cooled down enough, mix it together with the buttermilk mixture.  Make sure it's cool though, or else you'll wind up with scrambled eggs, and I'm sorry, but scrambled egg chocolate sheet cake just doesn't have the same ring to it.

Pour this onto a sheet pan and bake at 350 degrees for about 20 minutes.  I don't have a sheet pan with rims that high, so I used my trusty 9 x 13" pan.  NBD.

After I got the batter into that pan, I realized... I still have a ton of batter left.  There's only one reasonable solution to such a problem.

DINOSAUR CUPCAKES.  I'm sorry, but just bask in the glory of this awesome pan.  Are you jealous you don't have one??!??!

You could make a frosting for this cake, but why?  It's honestly so moist and so rich, just a dusting of powdered sugar will do.  Make sure the cake is completely cool though, or else the powdered sugar will just melt into the cake.

Delicious.  As for the dino cupcakes?

I had no problem getting rid of those.

Ahahahhaa.  I love that pan.

Enjoy!

<3 Courtzilla

Strawberry Buttermilk Cupcakes

aka. THE BEST CUPCAKES EVER.

Matt made me go to the bookstore, and I ended up picking up three new books that I absolutely do not need, one of them being Martha Stewart's cupcake book. Clearly, I needed to bake immediately.

These may be my favorite cupcakes of all time. I think the boys agreed, they got demolished in record time. I swapped out her frosting for a concoction of my own, and swapped buttermilk for regular milk. Fresh strawberries, vanilla, buttermilk? YES PLEASE.

Here's how you make them! (Makes ... a ton. Like 36 - 40)

You'll need:
2 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup cake flour (not self rising)
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, at room temperature
2 1/4 cups sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
3 large whole eggs, plus 1 egg white
1 cup buttermilk
2 cups finely chopped strawberries, plus more for garnish


Frosting:
- 1 box of powdered sugar
- 4 oz cream cheese
- 4 spoonfuls of strawberry jam
- pinch of salt
- 1/4 cup of milk

While not exactly simple per se, these have become my new favorite cupcake. SO moist, SO delicious. Watch me work.

First, sift together the flours, baking powder, and salt. Set aside. Might want to preheat your oven to about 350 degrees at this point.



Cream together the sugar, vanilla, and softened butter, until pale and fluffy. Then, add the eggs, one at a time, into the mixture. Make sure each egg is beaten into the butter/sugar before added the next egg. Did that sentence make sense? No idea.

Next, mix in the flour in two batches, alternating with the buttermilk.



Now, you'll want to chop up about 1/2 of your strawberries. We'll use the rest for garnish. Fold the chopped berries into your batter. When it bakes up, it'll look like this...dispersing fresh berries all through your cupcake!



Fill each cupcake tin about 3/4 of the way up, and bake for 20-25 minutes. Cool on a rack completely, about 30 minutes.



For the icing, pretty much dump everything in a bowl and stir.



If you want it thinner, you can add more milk. I really like the flavor of this icing. Originally I was just going to make the one on the back of the powdered sugar box, but it was WAYYYY too sweet. So, to counter it, I added a bit of salt, then some strawberry jam and the cream cheese. WAY good. Too good? I ate the leftovers with a spoon. Don't tell anyone.

Pile the frosting on top, and garnish with your strawberries!




Yeah. That happened. Thank you Martha, you've made my world a much better place.

Enjoy!

<3 Courtzilla

Rainbow Bday Cupcakes

Tomorrow is my good friend Brenda's birthday party. To celebrate, I wanted to bake her something... when I asked what she wanted, she said "anything with cream cheese frosting". Oh good, that narrows it down. I love color. I love dinosaurs. I'm going to make rainbow dinosaur cupcakes with cream cheese frosting.

Oh, I went there.

These didn't turn out as nice as I had hoped. They're a pretty good flavor, but the layers were a big fail, and I definitely used 23432 times too much batter in the first batch. They puffed up way higher than normal, which probably had something to do with the excess batter. Try them yourself and let me know how they go... they were still cute and delicious!

Oh, and I got the original recipe here.

You will need (for 10 cupcakes):
1 cup all purpose flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 cup sugar
2 large eggs
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1/2 cup buttermilk - remember that sweet trick I taught you?
1 tsp vanilla extract
red, yellow, green and blue food colorings

Okay, first you'll want to combine the flour, baking powder, and salt in a medium sized bowl. Like so.


Next, combine the sugar, eggs, vanilla, oil, and buttermilk in a large bowl.


Add the flour mixture slowly to the egg mixture, stirring as you go. In a bit, you'll end up with something like this!


Now for the fun part. Divide the batter into 5 smaller bowls. Add food coloring to each bowl. For the rainbow, I used blue, green, yellow, orange, and red. Where's violet and indigo you say? I say bite me.


See how much batter I used? Don't do what I did. Only do one spoon full for each layer. Trust me.

To make the layers, put the blue in first, then green, then yellow, then orange, and top it off with red. It should look something like this.... but hopefully you're more patient than I am because I clearly started to get lazy.


Then, let these suckers bake at 350 degrees for 15 minutes.

Holy rise batman!

I didn't take pictures of me making the frosting, so sue me. It's basically 1/2 stick of butter and an 8oz package of cream cheese blended together. Then, you add 1 tsp of vanilla extract and anywhere from 2 1/2 to 4 cups of powdered sugar and mix it all together. Simple, tasty, I wish it was fluffier. Today was not my cupcake day. Anyway.... So I swirled some cream cheese glaze over the cakes... and added some decor.


Hahah! Look at these beauts! With the small bit of leftover batter, I made little cookie sized bites for my roommate to nibble on.


Ok and maybe one or two for me too.



I think he's my favorite.

Enjoy!

Oh... another tip... make sure to wash your hands after using the food dye, especially if it's the concentrated kind like mine. Looks like my hands got sunburned. Sexy.



Have a great weekend!

<3 Courtzilla