Comfort in a Cup(cake)

Ben's grandmother died on the 3rd. He has been off of work for a week, so there is no need for making early breakfasts. We are spending a lot of time with Ben's mother in Salem, so dinner is usually eaten out. As a consequence I have not cooked anything since the 10th. All of the comfort and love I could express to Ben through food has sadly been ignored. That is, until this last weekend.

I knew that my desire to cook, both for Ben and for the joy of it, was intensifying. However, I had no idea that it would affect the volume of how much I wanted to cook. I figured that cupcakes would be the best way to go - sweets generally cheer a troubled soul, and I had a cupcake tin that fit conveniently enough into Lenny. With a renewed sense of courage after my last cupcake debacle, I approached Ben with half a dozen recipes and asked him to choose one. He chose a delicious chocolate cream cheese recipe that made a beautifully colored treat, but it seemed too savory for my purpose.

Before the first set of cupcakes had cooled, I was already working on more batter. This time, I tried a chocolate cupcake recipe and added 1 cup of toffee chips to make it interesting. Unfortunately, I accidentally added three times the amount of cocoa powder requested in the recipe. I don't know whether or not it adversely affected the cupcakes, but the finished product was a sticky mushroom cloud of a thing that more closely resembled a chocolate bran muffin. It, too, was not as sweet as a traditional cupcake. Ben suggested some frosting to complement the rich batters, but in my kitchen-atrophied state I was a little wild with ambition. Instead, I made a rich homemade caramel sauce for a topping. This did not work ideally with the chocolate cream cheese cupcakes, and only made the chocolate toffee cupcakes stickier.

At this point a crazier muse kicked me in the side of the head. With two cupcake recipes and caramel sauce already made, I began whipping up a third batch of batter. I took Amy Sedaris's vanilla cupcake recipe (with a heaping extra dose of vanilla), spooned caramel sauce on the top (much like the chocolate cream cheese cupcake recipe), slid it in the over, and prayed. The results were by far my favorite. I noticed that each cupcake was marked with a slice, where the heated caramel had sunk in. The top of the cupcakes were singed like creme brulee, the baked batter was delightful, and the center of the cupcakes held the majority of the caramel as a sweet, creamy surprise. These may be forever known as my creme brulee cupcakes.

The end result of a week away from my hobbit kitchen: 40 cupcakes in three varieties, almost a liter of caramel sauce, and a vanilla cake made with the remainder of the third batter because I ran out of cupcake papers. I would have taken pictures, but they all disappeared in record time.