I have to thank Lauren for randomly throwing together a batch of Snickers cupcakes while I was in North Carolina.  These things were pretty fantastic.  We have stated before that we are not in complete support of the recent cupcake takeover, but as long a I get to eat a cupcake or two like this every now and then I’ll keep my mouth shut.  While I absolutely despise baking myself, I have to give some respect to the people who actually have the patience to measure out their ingredients and make stuff like this.

Hello, faithful food lovers – I have an apology, a cheesecake, and some news for you. The apology is thus: Sorry I haven’t been around to talk about sugar highs and fresh baked delights for a really, really long time. My life has been a little topsy-turvy lately, and things kind of got away from me.  Which brings me to the news: I’m actually not gonna be around much, for awhile.  I have officially moved to San Francisco to pursue my masters degree, and between being a full-time grad student, working two part-time jobs (it’s expensive out here, yo) and living in such an incredible and amazing city, I don’t forsee a whole lot of free time for baking in my near future.  I knew this was coming when I signed on here, and I have to say it’s bittersweet. Baking and writing for EP has been a whole lot of fun and I hope to come back to it regularly when things calm down a little here. (So, John: please don’t take away my login! In the words of my esteemed governor, I’ll be back.)

And now, for what you’re here for: a farewell cheesecake!  For most of August it was really, really hot in Urbana, so I didn’t much feel like baking in the traditional, oven-on sense. I DID feel like having my friends over for one last cake party, though.  So when I found a no-bake cheesecake with a lovely and unusual twist in the August Martha Stewart Living, I went for it.  I give you, with very few modifications (but some, because that’s just how I am):

No-Bake Goat Cheese and Mascarpone Cheesecake with Balsamic Cherries

Crust:
Butter (for your pan)
1.5 cups graham crackers, beaten or food-processed to a pulp
3 tblspn melted butter
2 tblspn sugar
Cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg to taste

Butter a 9″ springform pan liberally.  Mix together your ingredients and press them into the pan, and refrigerate (or freeze) while you make the cake.

Cake filling:
4oz cream cheese at room temperature
4oz mascarpone cheese at room temperature
2oz soft goat cheese at room temperature
1 cup of sour cream
2/3 cup sugar, divided into 1/3s
1 tblspn vanilla
1 tbslpn lemon juice
1 cup heavy cream

Beat the three cheeses, the sour cream, 1/3cup of the sugar, the vanilla and the lemon juice in a large bowl until very smooth.   Try it with your finger or a spoon and marvel at how you never really though goat cheese would be good in a cheesecake, but totally is.  Don’t eat it all with the spoon.  In a separate bowl, beat the heavy cream and the other 1/3cup sugar on high until medium to stiff peaks form (or until soft peaks form and you’re really tired of standing there, but medium to stiff peaks are preferable.)  Fold the whipped cream into the cheese mixture and spread into your chilled crust.  Freeze for at least 2 hours, or however long you can stand to leave it in there and not eat it.  There’s no way I left it for two hours, probably more like 45 minutes, and it was squishy but delicious.  The longer you freeze it, the less squishy it will be, although I do not think it will in any way affect its deliciousness.

Topping:
1/2 lb sweet cherries, pitted and halved (frozen is OK if, like me, you don’t feel like pitting half a pound of cherries, but fresh is probably better.)
1/4cup sugar
balsamic vinegar to taste (don’t skimp, the balsamicity is half the fun.)
1 tblspn cornstarch
1 tblspn water
cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, and freshly ground pepper

Bring about half of your cherries, the sugar, the vinegar, and your spices to a simmer in a saucepan.  Cook, stirring, until squishy.  (This is a very squishy recipe.)  I mean really squishy, kind of jam-like.  Whisk together your cornstarch and your water, and add the mixture to the saucepan.  Simmer for another minute or so, then remove from heat and stir in the remaining cherries.  Squish it a bit if you like, but part of the appeal is having some of the cherries still have their shape while the others are all syrupy.  Refrigerate until ready to serve.

Once you are ready to serve it, just plate the cheesecake, drizzle a bit more balsamic vinegar on top in a pretty pattern, and top with some freshly ground pepper.  You can add your cherries to the top to serve, or let people add them as they like to their individual slices – up to you.  And please note that most of the ingredients you are using (goat cheese, mascarpone, etc.) traditionally come in containers twice as big as you are using.  This is good.  Once you make one of these things, you will totally want to make another one right away to have all to yourself.  In fact, perhaps you should anticipate this and make twice the cherry mixture to start with.  Mmmmm, it was really good.

And that’s all for now.  It’s been really fun, guys, and I hope to be back again soon.  If you are in San Francisco, look me up and we’ll go eat some cupcakes.

- Megan

Check out this recipe for Rikers Island prison carrot cake. Apparently its the favorite of the inmates.  If it’s good enough for Rikers, it should be good enough for you, your family, and literally…your 12,999 closest friends.  Just gotta make 100 of the batches below:

Yay! 25 Loaves of Prison-made Carrot Cake!

Rikers Island Carrot Cake

25 pounds sugar

3 gallons vegetable oil

25 pounds flour

8 ounces salt

1 pound baking powder

8 ounces baking soda

6 ounces nutmeg

6 ounces allspice

4 ounces clove powder

4 ounces ginger

8 ounces cinnamon

25 pounds carrots

25 pounds eggs

8 pounds walnuts

20 pounds raisins

8 ounces vanilla extract

1. Place in a mixing bowl – sugar, flour, cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, clove powder, allspice, baking powder, baking sods, salt. Using a paddle mix on slow for five minutes.

2. Add raisins, carrots, walnuts, eggs, vegetable oil and vanilla extract mix on slow speed for an additional five minutes.

3. Increase speed to medium for 10 minutes.

4. Pour into loaf pans. Pans should be three-quarters full.

5. Bake at 350° for 40 minutes.

Each batch makes 25 loaves of carrot cake.

Maybe cut this recipe by 25?  Now THAT’S a math problem you can sink your teeth into.  Heh.  Heh. Heh.  Why do I suddenly feel like that guy from reading rainbow?

Why does Rikers look like my old dorm room?

What was it that John said about not basing too many posts off of Thisiswhyyourefat?  Well: this totally started as a This Is Why You’re Fat post about Guinness Pudding, which then led me over to Sprinklebakes (who is so brilliant!) and a fantastic explanation on how to make it happen.  But… this is me, this is Epic Portions, and I wanted to make it my own. (Also: I’m from St Louis once-upon-a-time, and I don’t really enjoy that that company that owns Guinness is kind of taking over, and I wanted to support the home team.)  So, I eliminated the Guinness, replaced it with Schlafly’s Oatmeal Stout, added a chocolate graham crust, and voila: Chocolate Stout Pie.  Delicious!

Chocolate Stout Pie (makes two 8in pies)
1.5 cups chocolate graham crumbs
6 tblspn melted butter
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 tablespoon salt

11 egg yolks
1 1/3 cup sugar
20 oz stout
4 cups heavy whipping cream
10 oz high-quality chocolate

First, make your crusts. Melt the butter, crumble your graham crackers, and combine them with the sugar and salt.  Press firmly into your pie pans, and bake for 15 minutes in a 350F over.

Now, for your pudding: in a metal bowl, beat together the egg yolks and the sugar.  Slowly pour the stout into a large glass, pouring down the side so that you don’t get foam.  Foam = bad for baking.  Now, take a heavy-bottomed saucepan and pour half of the stout into it.  Add 3 cups of the heavy cream, and slowly heat until bubbles begin to form at the edges.  Meanwhile, melt your chocolate in a double-boiler.  Once the bubbles are forming over in cream-stout world, pour the hot liquid into the melted chocolate and beat until combined.  Slowly pour that mixture into the egg mixture, beating constantly to prevent it from curdling.  (No, spell check, I did not mean cuddling. Curdling.)  Pour the entire mix back into your saucepan and cook over medium heat for about 20 min, until it thickens to coat the back of a spoon.  Pour the cooked mixture into a blender and blend on high for about two minutes, then pour into your baked crusts.  Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate until cooled.

In the meantime, pour the other half of the stout into a small saucepan and bring to a boil.  Reduce to medium heat and simmer for a good long time until you have a syrup.  Just don’t burn it – it’ll smell really bad and taste even worse.  When you have a nice thick delicious stouty syrup, pour it into a small bowl and refrigerate until cool.  Once your syrup is cool and your pudding is set, beat the remaining cup of heavy cream into soft peaks, then add the syrup and beat until combined.  Divide between your pies, refrigerate for an hour or so to set everything, and serve.

Trust me, you’ll be glad it makes two!

My friend Jamie loves soccer – I mean, really loves soccer – so there was hardly any other choice for his birthday a few weeks ago than a 3-D soccer cake.

It ended up as an ice-cream-filled chocolate cake with two kind of icing, and since that’s a little much even for me, I had some MUCH-appreciated help on this one from Jamie’s girlfriend Julia. This was really more about the idea than the recipe, so we went with some tried and true favorites:

First, I baked Martha’s Ultimate Chocolate Cake, only instead of using a normal old traditional cake pan I made it in a 5.5qt stainless steel bowl. And I baked it… well, for awhile. One hour and forty-five minutes awhile. Seriously, just leave it in there and just keep checking it. It’s going to take forever.

Once it’s done, you need to cool it down.  Having taken nearly two hours to bake, it’s gonna take a long time to cool. I stuck it in the freezer; it didn’t actually help that much.  But, in my case, Julia was over so we used this time to make some tasty cream cheese frosting.  If you need a refresher on that, it’s pretty much the easiest thing ever: beat together a package of cream cheese and a stick of unsalted butter until fluffy, then add powdered sugar to taste.

Also, soccer balls are black and white by nature, so we needed to make some black frosting.  Since Jamie’s favorite flavor of ice cream is mint chocolate chip, we made mint chocolate frosting and colored it black, but any dark-colored frosting would work. Definitely start with something already dark, though; we used an entire little pot of black Wilton’s dye and it still looked a little grey, so I can’t imagine the food coloring you would need to turn white icing really black. Ugh.  I unabashedly stole borrowed the frosting recipe from this Southern Living Mint Chocolate Frosting recipe, except I used a lot more of the mint-chocolate morsels and I certainly did not use a microwave instead of a double-boiler, thank you very much.

Now: the fun part.  Once you have two kinds of yummy frosting made, you need to hollow out the inside of your cake-bowl.  Turn the cake upside down, so that the flat part is on the bottom, and use a sharp bread knife to hollow out the center.  Save the bits you are taking out, becuase you will need them to make a cake cap on top of the ice cream.  Once you have it hollowed out – to your taste of course, maybe you want a thick layer of cake, maybe you only want a little – fill the inside with ice cream.  We took the easy route here and bought mint chocolate chip ice cream… if you have an ice cream maker and you want to add another hour of cooking onto your day, then go for it! (Homemade ice cream is inevitably better, but honestly – we filled a cake with it and then covered it with two kinds of frosting.  You couldn’t really tell.)

Once your cake is filled with ice cream, use the cake bits you hollowed out (and plenty of your imagination) to fashion a top to it that makes it round enough to pass for a ball. Slather it in cream cheese icing, all over, and stick it in the freezer for ten minutes or so to firm up before you continue to decorate.  Once it’s nice and solid, put your black icing into a piping bag and draw the pentagons. If you are really artistic and smart you might be able to wing this; we had a med student and a graphic design student in the kitchen and we needed to make a mold. We made a little pentagon out of tin-foil, and carved the pentagons into the cream cheese icing, then piped the black icing over and into the shapes.  Connect them with thin lines of icing, and you have your soccer ball!

The last finishing touch here was the grass – we just colored some of the cream cheese icing green, and piped it around the base of the cake, then used wooden skewers and a fork to pull it up around the cake so it looked like blades of grass.

Voila! Yummm…

Cupcakes: they’re simple, they’re delicious, and they’re perfect for a birthday party. No cutting or silverware required, no one need be afraid to be the first to dig in or worry about how big a piece they take.  But, on the downside, they can seem a little kid-ish.  Maybe not the perfect treat for an elegant, catered surprise 30th birthday?  Well, they can be.  If, say, you make them in some elegant flavors like Strawberry-Basil and Green Tea.

There’s not a lot for me to say about these except that the strawberry could have tasted more like basil, but instead tasted like strawberry milkshakes, which was completely fine with everyone, and that the green tea were the prettiest little cupcakes I’ve ever made.  Maybe it’s my own affinity for green – my favorite color – but they turned out such perfect little orbs of a wonderful shade of pale emerald that they were almost as much fun to look at as to eat.

photo by Erica Janky

Strawberry-Basil Cupcakes
1 lb fresh strawberries, washed and cored
fresh basil – the more you use, the stronger the taste
1 cup water
1 cup sugar
- – -
1 stick (1/2 cup) butter at room temperature
1 cup sugar
1 egg
2 egg whites
1.5 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tspn salt
1/4 cup half & half
1 tblspn vanilla
- – -
8 oz cream cheese
1 stick (1/2 cup) butter
powder sugar to taste

Wash the basil and chop or tear it into small pieces. Place it, the 1 cup water, and the 1 cup sugar into a small saucepan and simmer it until the sugar is dissolved and the basil flavor has thoroughly steeped into the syrup.  Strain it to remove all of the basil pieces from the syrup, and place the syrup and the strawberries back into the saucepan.  Cook the mixture down until the strawberries are squishy and delicious.  Strain the mixture, reserving the liquid; you will use the squishy basil-berries in the cake and the syrup in the frosting.

Cream together your butter and sugar until fluffy.  Blend in egg and egg whites, then flour, baking powder and salt.  Add the half & half, vanilla, and your squishy strawberries.  Beat until the berries are in small pieces and everything is well combined.  Divide into lined cupcake tins and bake for 25 minutes (or until done) in a 350F oven.  Remove and cool completely before icing.

For the frosting, beat the cream cheese and sugar together until fluffy.  Add, in small amounts at a time, the strawberry syrup and powder sugar until you get to a strawberryness, sweetness, and consistency you like.

Green Tea Cupcakes (adapted slightly from Cupcake Bakeshop)

2 sticks (1 cup) butter at room temperature
2 cups sugar
2 eggs
2 egg yolks
3 cups all-purpose flour
2 tspn baking powder
1/2 tspn salt
1 cup half  half
2 tblspn green tea powder
- – -
8 oz cream cheese
1 stick (1/2 cup) butter
green tea powder and powder sugar to taste

Cream butter and sugar together until fluffy.  Beat in eggs and egg yolks, then flour, baking powder and salt.  In a small bowl, mix the half and half and green tea powder together, and beat into batter.  Beat until well combined and smooth.  Divide between lined cupcake tins and bake for 25 minutes (or until done) in a 350F oven.  Cool completely before frosting or you’ll end up with a green gooey runny mess, which would be a shame, because these cupcakes are just so pretty.

For frosting, beat together the butter and cream cheese with green tea powder and powder sugar to taste until you reach a frosting you’re happy with.

There you go – some very grown up cupcakes that are absolutely delicious.  Enjoy!

What do you do when you are meant to be at a friend’s surprise birthday dinner – complete with a homemade birthday treat – in a little less than an hour?!  You cheat.  Plain and simple: Cheating Choco-Cherry Cupcakes. I topped these with cherry-mascarpone frosting, but I’ve gone with cream cheese icing before and it works well, too.  You can make these little gems in well under an hour’s time start to finish, and they taste just as good or better than any other recipe I have.  Promise!

Cheating Choco-Cherry Cupcakes (w/ Cherry-Mascarpone Frosting)
1 chocolate cake box mix
2 cans cherry pie filling (21oz each)
3 eggs
1/4 cup vegetable oil
8oz mascarpone
1 stick butter (softened is nice, nuked works too)
1.5 cups powder sugar

Preheat your oven to 350F.  While it’s heating, put the cake mix, one and a half cans of pie filling, the eggs, and the oil in a large bowl. Beat until combined with a hand mixer – the cherries in the pie filling will get beaten into smaller pieces in the process, and that’s good.  Pour batter into lined cupcake tins and bake for 25 minutes or until the toothpick trick works.

While baking, place the mascarpone, sugar, and butter into a separate bowl and beat with clean beaters until smooth.  Gradually beat in the other half can of pie filling until you reach a consistency and cherry-ness that you like.  Again, the hand mixing action will turn the cherries into small pieces, which makes for a very pretty frosting.  Place the frosting in the freezer to get it really cold.

When your cupcakes are done, remove from the oven and place immediately into your refrigerator to get them cooled down quickly. When you think they are cool enough, or when you’ve run out of time, frost with the frosting.  Enjoy!

The best thing about this recipe: choco-cherry is totally just a suggestion! Grab a box mix, grab some pie filling, and experiment. Lemon strawberry? Delicious! Choco-pumpkin? Weird, but good.  And if you are at all like me, and the moment someone mentions anything even remotely worth celebrating you think, “I should make some cake for that!” it’s a good practice to keep a box mix and some pie filling on hand. Voila, cupcakes!

Also, in my rush, I failed to get any pictures of the cupcakes themselves. But, I did get a good picture of the b-day boy about to be lit on fire by his own treat. Happy birthday, An-Phong!