I had stepped away from my gluten-free baking for a while and had wanted to get back to it. I was interested in making a good cupcake. I also had some large zucchini from a neighbor. Combine the two to get some yummy gluten-free chocolate zucchini cupcakes.


I topped them with a simple chocolate buttercream with some cinnamon and nutmeg. I had to be sure it was really soft for icing the cupcakes because they were delicate and crumbled easily - a problem often with gluten-free baked goods. Without that gluten, you don't get the gluey proteins from the flour to hold it together well.

This recipe was adapted from one that I found on 101 Cookbooks.


    1 1/2 cups ) brown sugar
    1/4 cup  melted butter
    3/4 cup  vegetable oil
    3 eggs
    1 tsp  vanilla
    1/2 cup  buttermilk
    2 cups  grated zucchini
    1 cup  chocolate chips
    1/2 cup tapioca flour
    3/4 cup potato starch
    3/4 cup sorghum flour
    1/4 tsp xanthan gum
    1 cup cocoa, sifted
    1/2 tsp salt
    2 tsp  baking soda
    1 1/2 tsp cinnamon

Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees F. Lightly grease large muffin pans and line with muffin cups.
In a medium bowl mix together the sugar, butter and oil. Beat in eggs, one at a time until well Incorporated. Stir in vanilla, buttermilk, zucchini and chocolate chips.
In a separate bowl mix together all of the dry ingredients. Add the liquid ingredients and mix until well combined. Spoon batter into large muffin pans. Bake in the center of the oven for about 35 minutes. Cool on a wire rack, while preparing the icing.


Icing

1 stick of unsalted butter
2 cups of powdered sugar
1/3 cup cocoa powder
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon nutmeg
1 T hot water

Cream together butter, sugar, and cocoa powder. Add spices and blend til smooth. Add hot water if necessary to loosen the icing even more.




Zucchini

With all the cupcake tasting I've done lately, I have had a desire for flavor combinations. I was invited to a BBQ and offered to bring the dessert. Here was my chance to make the pina colada cupcakes I've been dreaming of for a while.

I wanted to make these with a coconut cake and a pineapple frosting. I purposely wanted the separation of the flavors in the two elements that would then come together.

As an added bonus, I used rum. Alcohol in baked goods keeps them nice and moist. Have you had a rum or kahlua fudge cake? I also brushed the finished cupcakes with rum before I frosted them. If kids are around you can make some without. In the picture the green are for kids and the red for the adults. You can brush them once or twice, depending on how much rum you want to soak in. I did twice and think next time I'll even do a third.

I had wanted to do a decorator tip piping of the frosting, but the chunks of crushed pineapple clogged the tip. I ended up just spreading the frosting on.

Coconut cake

* 3 cups sifted flour
* 4 teaspoons baking powder
* 1/2 teaspoon salt
* 1/2 cup shortening
* 1/2 cup butter
* 2 cups sugar, divided
* 1 1/3 cups coconut milk
* 1 teaspoon vanilla
* 1/3 cup shredded coconut
* 5 egg whites

Cream shortening and butter with 1 1/3 cups of the sugar. In a small bowl, combine flour, salt, and baking powder. Add sifted flour alternately with coconut milk, beginning and ending with flour; add vanilla. If desired, add 1/3 cup fresh coconut to the batter. Blend in the 1/2 cup of rum. In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites, gradually adding the remaining 2/3 cup sugar, to soft peaks stage. Fold egg whites into cake batter, just enough to incorporate. Scoop batter into lined cupcake pans, filling to 3/4 full. Bake in a preheated 350° oven for 25 minutes, or until cupcakes bounce back when touched lightly.

After the cupcakes come out of the oven, brush them with more rum. When they are completely cooled, frost with pineapple frosting.

Pineapple Frosting

1/2 cup butter
4 cups sifted confectioners' sugar
6 tablespoons well drained crushed pineapple
1 to 2 tablespoons pineapple juice

Cream butter; gradually beat in sugar, creaming well. Stir in crushed pineapple and just enough pineapple juice to make it spreadable. Beat to blend thoroughly.


Coconut Milk




Pineapple

Icing on the Cupcake

Recently I've been doing a lot of cupcake tasting. It's not that I really like cupcakes, but that I became aware of some new cupcake shops and wanted to do some comparisons. Here is a quick link to my other reviews for Esther's Cupcakes (my current favorite) and for Let Them Eat Cake in Davis. Today's store: Icing on the Cupcake in Rocklin.

As I said in the Esther's review, it's a little late in the game or food trend curve to be doing cupcakes. It's not even 2009, it's more like 2007-8. For how far Sacramento has come on the dining scene, are we so behind on the dessert and food trend scene? The answer is YES!!! If you regularly read my blog you know of my bitching on the lack of dessert places and our stupid city ordinances that are deterring the great prospects of gourmet food trucks. SIGH! But if we must suffer with the lack of dessert eateries, at least a tiny portion of that is being taken care of with cupcakes. The only thing is, they aren't the late night, dessert date spot that I keep praying for.

I must make do.

But today we are talking about Icing on the Cupcake. The reason I even heard of it was through people comparing Esther's to IotC on Yelp. Although I see Yelp's place in the internet world, I generally steer clear of it as being just TOO open for just anyone to comment. You know how it is on any open commenting site, you get haters out there that just slam things mean spiritedly and that just annoys me. (And before you go comparing me to them, this is MY blog and I can say what I want on my own pages.)

I digress.

Since I was heading out to Placer County for a Tweetup event, I figured I might as well stop in and pick up some cupcakes from this latest contender. I found the shop in old Rocklin on Pacific Street. You can't miss the store with it's large cupcake logo sign and the candy striping of their pink and brown colors. This was the largest store of the ones I've visited, with seating both inside and in a nice covered patio outside. Inside the store were two display cases and a small counter.


IotC changes their flavors by a weekly schedule. I had looked up Tuesday on their website and knew I was going to get the pistachio and the June special of raspberry lemonade. Because I wanted the special flavors, I called ahead and left a message asking them to save them for me. I didn't want them to run out and I'd be left with boring chocolate and red velvet. They were very good in calling me back to let me know they did and they looked forward to my visit. Once I got there I also added an orange cupcake to my order. I liked that the packaging here was in the nice cardboard cupcake boxes similar to Esther's. Note that if you come back with the box (recycling effort) you will get a free cupcake. That's a great deal. Don't you wish more bakeries offered that!?



I went home and split all of them in half so I could share them with my friend (and justify getting three!).

The cakes themselves were nice, moist, and had a good crumb. I was also happy to see them rising high out of the cupcake paper so that I wasn't being cheated of cake. Two of the three had good flavor too. After all, there should be flavor in both the cake and the icing. The pistachio and the orange did taste like their namesakes.

I was disappointed in the lemon cake of the raspberry lemonade cupcake. Perhaps it lacked flavor in the cake because you were getting an extra sugar punch with the embedded bit of raspberry filling. I'm finding that I'm not a big fan of injected fillings in my cupcakes. It could be because I'm an icing scraper. I go for center cut pieces of cake and even scrape the icing off those. So having an extra sugar shot in the cupcake and then the mound of icing on top is just too much for me. (Exception to this - melty chocolate or cream cheese in black bottom cupcakes.) Anyway, the lemon wasn't too strong in this cake, it all came in the icing.

Let's talk about icing. Buttercream, to be specific. Buttercream in basic form is butter creamed with powdered sugar, although other fats can be used. This seems like cheating to me because buttercream ought to have BUTTER only. Unfortunately, many buttercreams are made with margarine or even Crisco. Yuck! I'm a purist. Give me butter. And there is the number one reason Esther's is still winning my heart - their buttercream is buttery!

IotC's buttercream is supposedly made with butter as well, but it is nowhere near as buttery. I think the difference is what kind of buttercream they are doing. Esther's, I believe, is doing a French cooked buttercream which is considerably richer due to the eggs. IotC's icings were flavorful in terms of orange, pistachio, and lemon. And they were full of sugar - definitely sweet, but still a grainier, less rich, less soft buttercream. Then again, Cakegrrl (who obviously works a lot with cakes) made a valid point that in terms of catering, buttercreams are just going to melt and lose shape. So you need to have an icing that will stand up to time and temperatures if you are going to have them out for a while, like at a wedding or a party. Touché.

At this point I can say that all three cupcake stores have great products and are WAY better than Cupcake Craving, which I refuse to even comment more on except to say that they use MIXES, and some others. It's been a while since I've been to Babycakes, so I guess I'll just have to re-taste them (haha). Luckily there is no real competition between the three because they are so far from each other: Davis, Rocklin, Sacramento. Esther's is still my fave, but I would certainly be happy to check in to the others when in the vicinity to see what cool flavor combos they have that day.

It's been no secret that I have a sweet tooth. My biggest problem with the dining scene in Sacramento is that we have a serious lack of good dessert places. Yes, there are a few good pastry chefs working at certain restaurants. What I'm talking about is specialty dessert places where you can take a date or go for an after show treat late at night. The choices with large dessert selections are Tower Cafe, which I do like, and Rick's Dessert Diner, which isn't that great but survives, in my opinion, because of this great lack of options in town.

Where are the great desserts? Try fifteen miles down the road in Davis. Somehow this college town has gotten the good stuff. I mentioned one place in an old post. Little Prague is a Czech restaurant with Eastern European food and a nice dessert carousel filled with lovely pastries. See that review for more on their selection.

Recently I went on a pastry trek to Davis. My mission - to try two places that beckoned me. One was Konditorei, which I've been aching to try for a long time. The other I had just heard about, a new gourmet cupcake place called Let Them Eat Cake. I read about them in the latest issue of Edible Sacramento.


My first stop was to Let Them Eat Cake. I wanted to compare them to my recent visit to Esther's Cupcakes. LTEC is hidden away and almost missable in an non-descript building on L Street. It's not even facing the street, but in a back door down the side area. Since I was there late on a weekday afternoon, some of the flavors were sold out and all that was left were their basic flavors. I got the last brown sugar cake that I think had a pineapple cream cheese frosting and their Dubliner a “Guinness Stout chocolate cake with chocolate buttercream frosting”.


What I liked was that the cakes were good. As I've mentioned in other posts, the texture and flavor of the cake is more important to me than icing and decoration. Americans have become too complacent with fluffy cake mixes and store sheet cakes. A quality cake is denser and closer to pound cake than those awful examples. The brown sugar cake had a good crumb and nice, light flavor. The chocolate cake had just the subtle flavor of the beer that gave it a nice difference from plain chocolate. The pineapple cream cheese frosting was nice, but the chocolate buttercream was not as good as Esther's. I'm still in love with Esther's frostings.

A couple more things to mention. I will try to go back on a Saturday. Apparently they do a special, unique flavor every Saturday. I really want to try something truly different. Lastly, I'd like to see them use a different packaging. They are in Davis, after all. Get rid of the plastic and go with paper.


Off I went to my next stop, Konditorei Austrian Bakery. Konditorei is the German word for a confectionery shop and this one has plenty.




To one side was a cake carousel, then the pastry counter, a gelato counter, a chocolate counter, and another pastry/danish counter. I was in sweet tooth paradise.


In my book the best pastries in the world come from Austria (although some will argue France). Give me a delicate, flaky pastry filled with pastry cream and fruit and you will become my BFF of the moment. Let's not forget my Napoleon comparison.


I took two pastries home to try. The one above is the Manzana Verde - cookie dough crust with a layer of Quark cheese with raspberries and topped with a tart green apple cream. The one below is the Layla Torte - white cake layers filled with marzipan cream and chocolate Grand Marnier cream and then the whole cake wrapped in a thin sheet of marzipan. Of the two I preferred the Layla. I found the Manzana a little too sweet but had good apple flavor. But you do have to like marzipan to eat the Layla as the almond flavoring is very strong too. In fact, that would probably be my overall criticism here, tone down on the flavors and sweetness.


So, Sacramento, when are you gonna get it together with one or more quality dessert places? I've had the discussion with some of my foodie friends and they agree with me. We are seriously lacking considering how far our dining scene has come. There's a need, and if someone who has the skills could just find a great location in Midtown, I know they could succeed. Meanwhile, I guess I should count my blessings that those pastries are calling from Davis. Otherwise, my waistline and wallet would be in trouble.