Stiching and Bitching and Baking

When you are in college and you live within walking distance of all your friends, life is amazingly simple; however, when you don't live close enough to see your friends every single day, sometimes you need to make excuses to see them.  My favorite excuse is a party for which I bake obscene amounts of food. I discovered rather quickly that a good way to get people to want to come to your parties is by making sure that they want to eat everything that you ever make because it tastes amazing.... it seems like a pretty good rule to live by.

My sister, also being a culinary genius in her own right, and I went a little overboard with this party...

She made amazing baklava!  It was incredibly delicious and I continuously had to make sure that she was getting the credit she deserved for such a wonderful creation :-)

 

(It isn't the best picture... but the lighting in my house is kinda lame...)

I made Lemon Ricotta Cookies (which were very interesting and soft), Italian Cream Cupcakes and an Italian Cream Cake in the shape of a fish... I love that fish pan.

The other exciting thing that I made was Root Beer Float Cupcakes!

 

(This also isn't a very good picture... I should have moved the ketchup bottle...lols)

I had tried another Root Beer Cupcake recipe before, and personally, while other people thought it was ok, I didn't like it as much as I had hoped I would... The cupcakes were overly moist and they didn't taste like Root Beer.  I wanted to try again, so I altered a recipe that called for Root Beer Schnapps and Root Beer by just using Root Beer and Artificial Root Beer flavoring.

Here was the original recipe, I found it here: Root Beer Float Cupcakes

1 cup root beer schnapps

1 1/2 cups old-fashioned style root beer (like A&W or Dads)
2 tsp. vanilla extract
2 cups dark brown sugar
1 cup butter
2 eggs
3 cups all purpose flour
1 Tbs. baking powder
2 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. salt

This is how I altered it:

 2 1/2 cups old-fashioned style root beer (I used IBC because I felt like buying something in glass bottles)

2 tsp. vanilla extract

1 tbsp. root beer flavoring

2 cups dark brown sugar
1 cup butter
2 eggs
3 cups all purpose flour
1 Tbs. baking powder
2 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. salt  (I actually forgot the salt, and they were ok, but I would recommend not forgetting the salt if you made them...)

 

If you went to the site where I found the recipe, you will notice that my cupcakes do not look like their cupcakes... this is because I wanted to go for a more Root Beer Float feel with a thick dollop of vanilla whipped cream frosting on top.

For the whipped cream frosting, all I did was beat some heavy cream, vanilla extract, and a little bit of powdered sugar... I don't like my whipped cream frosting to be very sweet.

The most exciting part of these cupcakes, however, was the fizz!!!  I had decided that I felt the carbonation in a Root Beer Float was really important.  In order to duplicate that, I cut the tops off of the cupcakes, filled them up with pop rocks, put the tops back on, and covered them with frosting.  It is probably better to do this after the cupcakes have been sitting out for just a little while and have lost a bit of moisture... the pop rocks don't pop as much then before you put them in your mouth.

 

These were fairly awesome :-)  I would definitely make them again. Also, in case anyone was wondering, they did legitimately taste like Root Beer, and the Cherry Pop Rocks blended quite nicely with the flavor... I think Cherry would probably work best.