Cupcakes!

circuit_four linked to a post at the Cupcake Project a few days ago, and I made the mistake of not only following the link, but then browsing around the site. Afterwards, Lut and I both wanted cupcakes.

I was specifically curious about the Better-Than-Sex Chocolate Cupcakes. I've never made chocolate-anything from scratch that I actually liked. Lots of chocolate brownies and cakes from mixes that came out well, and I've always liked canned frosting. But my past efforts to make chocolate cakes, brownies, frosting, or cookies from scratch have always been inferior to the mixes.

I've got a recipe from haikujaguar for brownies, for which she recommended a reasonable-quality baking chocolate, like Ghiradelli, but I've never tried it -- the time I planned to, I couldn't find anything but cheap baking chocolate at the store. Still, it's made me wonder if my problem with chocolate baked goods is that the ingrediants I've used were low-end -- cheap cocoa or baking chocolate from the grocery.

So this weekend, I decided to try making cupcakes from scratch using high-end ingrediants. On Saturday, I went to the Plaza, a midtown shopping district chock-full of pricey little specialty stores. I browsed around a couple of high-end food stores, and picked up expensive unsweetened cocoa powder, dark chocolate, white chocolate, vanilla, cream cheese, and butter. The last three weren't items I was especially concerned about quality with regards to, but I figured, what the heck, might as well go all the way. In the same spirit, when I hit a regular grocery for some of the remaining ingrediants (like mini-chocolate chips -- I couldn't find expensive versions of those, but since I like the taste of Nestle's chocolate chips I wasn't too worried here), I bought some "baking sugar" they had. Touted as fine-ground for better dissolving. Sure, why not.

I didn't actually make the recipe as described. Primarily, I didn't feel like messing with mousse. (a) I've never made mousse before (b) she didn't have a recommended recipe and most importantly (c) I'm not that wild about mousse anyway. Instead, I filled the cupcakes with ganache and frosted them with the Cupcake Project's 'my favorite chocolate frosting'.

My verdict:

* The cupcake batter was tasty, as good or better than any I've had before.
* The frosting was okay. I don't know. I've still had canned frosting I like better, though I've had canned frosting I like less too. I don't know what the heck they use in canned frosting that makes it taste good.
* The ganache was a little too dark for my taste, which basically means I should've used a lighter chocolate. Ganache is just heavy cream and chocolate, so its taste is wholly dependent on the chocolate used.
* The white chocolate was pretty good. I made sure to get one that actually used, y'know, chocolate. Since not all white chocolate does. Anyway, usually not a big fan of white chocolate, but since overall the cupcakes were more dark-chocolate than milk, the white drizzle added a bit more sweetness to them, which I liked.

Overall, they're pretty tasty. I froze half of them, because ZOMG that's a lot of cupcakes for two people. Were they better than sex? Ah-hahahahahahaha! No. If your cupcakes come out better than sex, than either I'm doing something wrong when I make cupcakes, or you're doing something wrong when you make love. >:)

Also, this is doing nothing for my whole 'I should try to eat better and get in better shape' notion that still floats in the back of my head. Oops. Anyway, I post about this because ... um ... I didn't really get much else done this weekend. >.>

Silly Pollsters

I really want to find the actual poll cited in this article but I haven't. Because this looks like the silliest poll question I've seen outside of an internet meme in quite a while:

From various sources (such as this one) "70 percent of those who sympathize with the tea-party movement ... want a federal government that fosters job creation."

Was that really the question? "Do you want a federal government that fosters job creation?" Really? What were the other 30% thinking, do you suppose? "No, I want a federal government that crushes the economy and destroys jobs, that way the revolution will come sooner"? I mean, seriously. What was the pollster who wrote this thinking? I wonder what the other questions were like. "Do you want access to quality health care?" "Are you in favor of clean air?" "Do you oppose murder?" :D

(hat tip to James Taranto of Best of the Web for calling attention to the poll.)

Edit:

Ah, the original poll is here, and the question appears to have been "Please tell me if this is something with which you strongly agree, mostly agree, mostly disagree, or strongly disagree: 'The government needs to do a lot more to create jobs'". Which doesn't sound quite as silly as "Should the government foster job creation?" But it still doesn't really tell me whether the people who agreed thought that the government should do more to create jobs by, say, spending $500 billion on infrastructure, or by eliminating corporate income taxes, or by firing themselves so their salaries can be redistributed back to taxpayers, or whatever. Moreover, it still seems badly worded to me -- strong disagreement might mean "No, I think the government is doing just the right amount" or it might mean "I don't want the government to do anything with regards to jobs, ever, including the stuff I think they're doing wrong right now."