Like a tasty flower.

Luckily, there’s a new cupcake competition starting this month, and it’s called Mystery Box. I happened to come across a tweet announcing it while I was coincidentally thinking about searching for cupcake inspiration. The timing couldn’t be better, and the first month’s theme? Totally my thing.

Floating in the clouds?

The theme for July 2010 is tea, something I enjoy immensely. I’m drinking tea right now, as a matter of fact. The hardest part was deciding on a tea to use – since you can only enter once per month, I knew I’d have to come up with something really good. I think I did just that.

Everything is better with toasted coconut!

I chose to flavor the cupcakes themselves with Thai tea, which is a fun choice because not only does Thai tea have an addictive, mysterious flavor (ingredients vary but there’s always some anise or other licorice-y spice in the mix, though it doesn’t taste like licorice), it also contains red and yellow dyes which make the tea bright orange when steeped. I hoped that both the color and flavor would carry over into the cupcakes once they were baked. As you can see, the color definitely shows. I’ve never seen cupcakes this color before!

Mmmm sweet tangy spicy pineapple jamminess.

I steeped the tea into the milk for my standard white cupcake recipe, using a lot to keep both the color and flavor strong. Happily, it worked perfectly and I was rewarded with bright orange, feathery-light cakes with a distinct Thai tea flavor.

In keeping with the Thai theme, I filled the cupcakes with pineapple jam. Since it was so sweet, I added a little tang by way of a smidge of tamarind paste, and a kick of spice via a pinch of cayenne pepper. I made a white chocolate coconut ganache to frost them with, though I wasn’t quite patient enough with it and it ended up as more of a glaze. It’s very sweet, though, so I think the glaze-y amount is perfect. To emphasize the coconut flavor and add texture, I also sprinkled them with toasted shredded coconut.

I wish you could taste this through the screen.

Thai Tea Cupcakes

First, Make the Frosting:

1. 150 g good quality white chocolate
2. 75 g coconut milk

Melt the chocolate over a double boiler. Heat the coconut milk until it steams, either in the microwave or in a saucepan. Pour the coconut milk into the white chocolate and gently whisk until fully emulsified. Chill until thick and almost set up, stirring a couple of times to ensure even thickening.

Then, Make the Cakes:

1. 1/2 cup + 2 Tbsp milk
2. 1 1/2 Tbsp loose Thai tea (I bought mine at Kalustyan’s and it’s incredible)
3. 1/4 cup unsalted butter
4. 1/2 cup sugar
5. 1 cup cake flour
6. 1 1/2 tsp baking powder
7. 1/4 tsp salt
8. 2 egg whites

Pour the milk into a small saucepan and heat until boiling little bubbles begin to form around the edge of the pan. Remove from heat and stir in the tea. Cover and let steep for 5-7 minutes. Strain thoroughly into a measuring cup, measuring out 1/2 cup. Cool thoroughly.

Preheat the oven to 350F. Sift together the flour, baking powder and salt. Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy, then add the milk and dry mixture alternately in thirds, mixing slowly and scraping down the bowl between additions. Once everything is blended, add the egg whites and mix on a medium-high speed for no more than 2 minutes, until the batter becomes somewhat fluffy. Spoon into lined muffin tins and bake 15-20 minutes, until a toothpick inserted into the center of one comes out clean and before the cupcakes start to brown at all. Allow to cool fully before filling or frosting.

Now Get That Filling Ready:

1. 3 Tbsp pineapple jam (you can make your own or use store bought, just find a good quality jam that only contains fruit, sugar, water, pectin, etc….no HFCS or anything)
2. Pinch of cayenne pepper
3. 1/8 tsp tamarind paste (optional but awesome)

Use a spatula to fold the pepper and tamarind thoroughly into the jam.

Let’s Toast Some Coconut:

1. 1/4 cup unsweetened dessicated coconut (that’s the really tiny stuff)

Preheat the oven to 350F. Spread the coconut out on a small baking sheet and bake for 5 minutes. Stir thoroughly to evenly distribute any browned areas, and continue toasting for another 3 minutes or so, until most of the coconut is a light golden brown. Set aside to cool.

Time to Put Them Together:

If you’re not used to working with extra soft cupcakes you might want to chill or even freeze them first to make the cake less crumbly. Use a small round cutter to punch out the middle of each cupcake, reserving the “lid” to each one and trimming them to 1/4″ thick. Place a blob of filling in each cupcake and replace the lid.

Prepare the frosting in a piping bag. Pipe some onto each cupcake in any style you wish, or let it become more fluid and “flood” the tops (you’ll have some serious cleanup to do on the paper if you go this route but it’s awfully pretty). Top each cupcake with a generous amount of toasted coconut.

Keeps well refrigerated up to a week or well-wrapped and frozen for a month or more. Allow to come to room temperature before devouring. Makes 10 full sized cupcakes.

For all the info on Mystery Box, head on over to Sweetest Kitchen.

The winner of July’s Mystery Box Cupcake Challenge will receive prizes from:

• Bake It Pretty; $5 electronic gift card
• Beanilla; Tahitian vanilla fleur de sel & 3 organic Indonesian vanilla beans
• Rishi Tea; the new Tsuki tea pot and 2 tins of tea
• Soapylove Glycerin Soap Design; a Soapy Pop
• Sweet Cuppin Cakes; a prize pack worth $25

Thank you to all our prize sponsors!

It looks so exotic!

The large cubes of orangey stuff are a very firm Thai tea panna cotta. Not so much sexy-wobbly, more Jello-firm-set. I could have used less gelatin but I wanted a sliceable panna cotta, since I set it in a loaf pan. And then I ended up cubing it because it looked like crap on the plate with the other elements. Ah, evolution.

Just a few streaks of tamarind, it's powerful stuff!

To offset the wonderful tropical sweetness of the elements in this dish (relax, we’re getting to the rest of them), I used tamarind concentrate. Tamarind on its own is very sour and easily overpowering, so I ended up using a brush to stripe it onto the inside of the glass, so as the dish sat and got eaten every bite would have just a bit of tanginess in it. It worked great and made the dessert so much more complex.

So dramatic against that black background!

All right, now we’ll get to the other elements. Those little segments? Fresh mangosteen, something I’d never come across before. But there they were, in mesh bags, sitting alongside fat, juicy dragon fruits and gargantuan star fruits at a Chinatown fruit cart. They’re what prompted me to change this dessert from Thai tea panna cotta with pineapple, spices and tamarind to Thai tea jelly cubes with fresh mangosteen, nata de coco and tamarind.

Nata de coco is unique and addictive.

Nata de coco? What’s that? It’s, uhh…ok, according to Wikipedia it’s a fermented product made from coconut water and carrageenan. Basically, they’re really firm little jelly cubes in syrup that explode with juiciness when you bite into them. You can get them in a bunch of different flavors (I almost bought pandan but ended up going with the plain ones) and the particular wonderland of a grocery store that I bought my jar from carries other fruits processed the same way, which I hope to try soon.

Before I give up the recipe I’d like to tip my virtual hat (I don’t really wear hats besides my knit strawberry hat in the winter and you can’t really tip a knit winter hat) to Pichet Ong. I first had both Thai tea and nata de coco at Spot and have been enthralled ever since.

Time for a tropical treat!

Thai Tea Jelly with Tropical Flavors

Thai Tea Panna Cotta

1. 1 1/2 cups cream
2. 1 1/2 cups milk
3. .75 oz. powdered gelatin (3 packets)
4. 1/4 cup sugar
5. 2 Tbsp Thai tea
6. 1 tsp sweetened condensed milk

Pour the cream into a medium saucepan and sprinkle with the gelatin. Allow to bloom 5 minutes. Stir gently over low heat until the gelatin dissolves. Add the milk, sugar and tea, simmer over medium until it just begins to boil and foam. Remove from heat, cover and steep 5-10 minutes, until the mixture is orange and fragrant. Strain into a bowl over an ice bath, mix in the condensed milk and beat until the mixture is cooled and the consistency of softly whipped cream. Pour into a plastic-lined loaf pan to set. Allow to sit in the refrigerator for 4 hours before unmolding.

To unmold, invert the loaf pan onto a large plate and peel off the plastic. Using a hot, dry knife, cut into 1″ cubes, trimming as necessary.

To Serve

1. Tamarind concentrate
2. Thai tea jelly cubes (about 8 per serving)
3. Fresh mangosteen segments (about 10 per serving, only use the smaller ones as the larger segments contain inedible pits)
4. Nata de coco (about 6 cubes per serving)

Using a small pastry brush, brush the inside of a small goblet with 4 light but thick stripes of tamarind paste. Place a couple jelly cubes in the bottom and fill in the gaps with mangosteen and nata de coco, layering the elements until the goblet is almost full. Serve chilled.

Though this came out completely differently from what I originally intended, it was delicious, refreshing and a lot of fun to put together. Plus it turned out so pretty!

…And SPEAKING of pretty, you may have noticed that my lighting doesn’t suck anymore. That’s because I now have a Magical Photography Cube with Accompanying Lights, courtesy of my awesome parents. Hopefully my pictures will be back up to the caliber they used to be. Thanks Mom and Dad!

Because changing the fruit on top just wasn't enough.

I’ve totally been slacking on the Daring Bakers front lately. It’s partially my schedule and partially a lack of inspiration – as much as I would’ve liked to have participated last month, I make a big batch of tiramisu every Saturday night at work and just wasn’t feeling the love for that particular dessert when it came down to it. But orange tian? I’d never even heard of it before!

So much prettier than oranges, don't you think?

Since we were given the ok to change the fruit and flavor the cream and sablee however we liked, I went for an Asian twist and used gorgeous two-toned grapefruit with black sesame whipped cream and matcha sablee. I was excited to finally have an excuse to buy some black sesame paste and very happy to bake something with matcha again.

Matcha is still awesome.

Flavorings aside, I changed up the recipe quite a bit. The marmalade in the original recipe calls for pectin and I personally feel that putting extra pectin in marmalade is a little silly. Citrus gels up quite fine on its own. I also had to use a different base recipe for it, though, since I was using grapefruit and no matter how long you cook it, the tough membranes between segments are no fun to eat. I also had to look up how to do the stabilized whipped cream with powdered gelatin, since that’s all I can really afford to use at home.

Bitter, sweet and oh so good!

I really like how this dessert came out. The marmalade is shockingly sweet but provides a great balance between the bitter matcha and nutty sesame cream, which isn’t really sweet at all. The grapefruit on top is predictably tart but the caramel sauce adds another nice dimension of sweetness. Overall the dessert is not very sweet, beautiful to look at and quite fun to put together. And the endless possibilities for matching citrus with cream and cookie flavors are an extra sweet bonus.

This was breakfast...

Grapefruit Tian with Matcha & Black Sesame

Matcha Sablee

1. 500g AP flour
2. 40g matcha
3. 1/4 tsp salt
4. 5g baking powder
5. 125g butter (cubed & chilled but not frozen)
6. 125g sugar
7. 1 egg
8. 25 mL cold water

Combine the flour, matcha, salt and baking powder in the bowl of a stand mixer. Add the butter and mix until incorporated (it will look sandy). Whisk together the sugar, egg and water, gradually add until incorporated. The dough will still be quite crumbly but should clump together if you squeeze it in your hand. If it’s not clumping, slowly add a little more water but not until it’s a wet or even cohesive dough. Wrap tightly in plastic and chill at least 30 minutes or overnight.

When ready to bake, preheat the oven to 350F and roll the dough to 1/4″ thick. Cut out circles in desired sizes and bake on a lined cookie sheet for 15-20 minutes, rotating halfway through. Don’t let the edges take on much, if any, color, but make sure that the undersides are fully baked. Cool fully before attempting to assemble tians.

Any leftover dough can be rolled into a log, brushed with water, rolled in sugar and sliced into cookies of desired size and thickness.

Grapefruit Marmalade

1. 1 grapefruit
2. 1/2 lemon
3. 400g sugar

Segment (supreme) the fruits, reserving the peels. Set the segments aside and chop the peel into very small pieces. Place in a saucepan and cover with water. Bring to a boil, then simmer until the grapefruit peel is translucent and orange all the way through. Let the blanched peel cool overnight, covered, in the water.

Drain the cooled blanched peels, reserving the water. Add enough water to measure 1 cup and combine in a saucepan with the peels, segmented fruit and sugar. Bring to a low boil and cook, stirring occasionally, until reduced by half. Transfer to a heat-proof container and chill.

Grapefruit Segments

1. 5-6 large grapefruits

Segment the grapefruits, place segments into a heat-proof container and set aside while you make the caramel sauce.

Grapefruit Caramel

1. 225g sugar
2. 300g fresh grapefruit juice

Place the sugar in a saucepan and heat until it begins to foam and caramelize. Gradually pour in the grapefruit juice. Once it’s all in, cook over medium heat until any crystals have melted. While hot, pour half of the sauce over the segmented grapefruits. Reserve the other half for plating.

Black Sesame Whipped Cream

1. 2 Tbsp cold water
2. 1 tsp (4.1g) powdered gelatin
3. 1 cup cream
4. 1 Tbsp powdered sugar
5. 1 Tbsp black sesame paste

Place the cold water in a medium mixing bowl and add the gelatin. In a stand mixer, start whipping the cream with the sugar on medium speed. Once the gelatin is saturated, place it over a simmering double boiler and melt into a liquid. Pour into the center of the whipping cream (it should be thick but not forming peaks at this stage), then add the sesame paste and whip to medium peaks.

Assembly

1. Ring molds
2. Plastic wrap
3. Grapefruit segments, drained on paper towel
4. Black sesame whipped cream
5. Matcha sablee in corresponding size(s)
6. Marmalade

Wrap one end of the ring mold tightly in plastic, forming a drum-like seal. Invert and arrange the segments on the plastic. Fill the molds with whipped cream to 1/4″ of the top of the mold. Spread marmalade on the sablee discs and invert them into the molds. Freeze immediately for at least 10 minutes before unmolding.

Like a buttery wall of poofitude, holding back the delicious contents within...

One thing I have noticed during my time in pastry school is that nearly all of the past Daring Bakers challenges are covered in the curriculum. And why not? Many of the challenges are traditional desserts made with classic elements, just like the things we made in school, which are based on a gradual progression of said elements and the different ways they can be assembled together.

Well hello my pretties.

So at the beginning of the month, when I was sitting in the hall at school on my lunch break, checking to see what this month’s challenge was on my phone, I wondered if it was something I had already covered in class. I doubted it was, since I was only a month into the class and had only made a bunch of tarts, cookies, pate a choux and a handful of puff pastry items.

Puffy little cap!

I was actually smack dab in the middle of the puff pastry unit, and was struggling like hell through the insane amounts of rolling (the actual rolling and turning process didn’t bother me, it was the early morning rolling of the pastry that had been chilling overnight that killed me…I’m not so good in the upper body strength department and my lack of height does not give me an awful lot of leverage). I opened the forum and saw the words “get out your rolling pins!”

Who likes figs?

Oh no. Oh nonononono…

Vols-au-vent. Which I had literally made the day before. And failed miserably at, I have to mention. Mine came out flat – they didn’t rise or poof at all. It was EMBARRASSING. I decided to give the challenge another couple of weeks so I could get over my traumatic first experience with these little towers of buttery yumminess. And you know what?

I like figs!

By the time we hit the second week of puff pastry I was doing just fine. It still took me a little longer than everyone else to roll out my pastry, but I was getting better every day and I was able to haul ass and completely catch up by the time we cleaned up for lunch every day. And I got a 96 on my puff pastry practical, with picture-perfect palmiers and a near-flawless pithivier. My speedy vol-au-vents were slightly less than perfect but I didn’t mind. I surprised the chef who had been after me all throughout the unit to catch up and be faster. I proved that it didn’t matter if I wasn’t the quickest at the start – slow and steady, right?

One of my favorite things about making these at home on my own was that I didn’t have to stick to any recipe exactly. I could make whatever filling I liked and even a variation on the pastry itself. Which I did, quite happily.

Beautiful fork, beautiful puffs.

We had made chocolate puff pastry in class, which is made by substituting cocoa powder for a small percentage of the flour by weight. Well, I thought to myself as we mixed the beurrage layer (which was going on the outside since it was an inverse base), I know something I like even better than chocolate that is powdered and pretty to boot!

The color was a great contrast to the horribly gray rainy day we're having.

Matcha puff pastry? Has it ever been done before? I don’t know but it’s unlikely. So I went for it.

I want to live in the little green tower!

I am actually very surprised that the matcha vols-au-vent got as puffy as they did – I had quite a lot of trouble with butter breaking up on the inside of the dough as I rolled it. I gave it a couple of extra turns to tuck the butter chunks on the inside and it clearly worked out fine in the end.

Imagine if I'd actually made the vol-au-vents with that cutter instead of just using it for the insides...sad part is I considered it. For like 2 seconds.

I had slightly different plans for the fillings of both versions. I was originally going to make a homemade mascarpone for the larger plain vols-au-vent, but just couldn’t find the time to ferment the cream. I’ve had a very busy week (and have an even busier one ahead of me – eek). I did have some leftover cream cheese from some semi-failed cupcakes a couple of weeks ago, so I just beat it with some orange blossom honey and a dash of orange blossom water before spreading it in and topping with fat, fresh figs and a drizzle of extra honey (plus some cris-crosses of honey on the plate). I actually panicked last night because I had been saving some figs a bit too long and they’d started to go fuzzy on me. I set out for Chinatown last night to find more – and my supply has completely dried up! I gave in and went to Whole Foods, where I paid a little more but got some delicious, lovely Turkish figs that went beautifully with the tangy cheese, sweet honey and buttery pastry shell.

Yeah, it's tiny.

The matcha vols-au-vent were meant to have a chocolate ganache filling to go with the tangy little pomegranate seeds and grassy, bitter pastry, but I realized a bit too late (on the way home last night) that I didn’t have any good chocolate to use for a ganache. However, I did have quite a bit of cream that was no longer going to be made into cheese, so I whipped it and added some powdered sugar. I thought about adding lemon zest and juice directly for flavor but worried about the cream curdling so I just sprinkled some zest onto the cream after piping it into the pastries, then arranged the pomegranate arils on top.

Sweet, sour, bitter, creamy and buttery - what a tasty combination.

Both versions turned out very tasty but I think I prefer the matcha one – not only is it gorgeous to look at but there are few things I like better than tea, freshly whipped cream and pomegranates. It’s buttery, bitter, sweet, sour and tangy all at once, with the seeds providing a nice crunchiness.

If you’d like to try making flavored puff pastry yourself, you can use any recipe and substitute matcha, cocoa powder or any other powdered flavoring element for 10-20% of the total weight of the flour. I substituted closer to 10% because my matcha is very high quality and quite strong and bitter – I would exercise the same caution with a Dutch process cocoa which is dark and bitter.

Expect to see some tasty palmiers here soon, since I have all the lovely leftover buttery dough hanging out in my freezer!

Swirly, speckled and cute.

Though I like the way chocolate-dipped meringues look, I think chocolate plus meringues would just be too sweet and might mask the delicate blend of spices and tea in the chai. So I used (what else) cacao nibs!

Sweet little kisses!

These took two batches to get right – partly because of the weather and partly because of the spice blend. I originally wrote out a recipe using the blend I made for my stupidly wonderful chai custard, but between the small quantities required for a recipe like this and the fact that the spices are consumed directly and not steeped in something, some of the flavors were overpowering. Just a tiny bit of star anise and two too many peppercorns turned the meringues astringent and overly-spicy. Not what I was going for.

They smelled goooood.

It was also still very wet out when I made the first batch and they ended up a little runny in the oven, with caramelized bottoms and a collapsible texture. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Tasted even better than they smelled.

So I tried again, leaving out the anise entirely, upping the allspice, reducing the pepper to one tiny white peppercorn for just a bit of spiciness, and baking them on the first of a stretch of drier, more summer-like days. Perfection ensued.

So sweet, so light.

Chocolate Chai Meringues

1. 1 pod green cardamom
2. 1 clove
3. 5 allspice berries
4. 1 white peppercorn
5. 1 tsp English breakfast tea (or other plain black tea)
6. 1/8 tsp cinnamon (freshly grated, if you have cinnamon sticks)
7. 3/4 cup sugar (I used 1/4 cup vanilla sugar but I don’t think it made a difference)
8. 3 egg whites, room temperature (preferably aged at least a day, too)
9. Handful or two of cacao nibs, for sprinkling

Preheat the oven to 175 (or 200 if your oven doesn’t go that low). Smash open the cardamom pod and place the seeds in a mortar and pestle. Add the clove, allspice, peppercorn and tea and grind until roughly broken up but not pulverized. Combine the sugar, tea and all spices in a food processor or heavy-duty blender and grind until the sugar is a fine powder and the spices and tea are also powdered and fully incorporated. Wait for the powdered sugar dust to settle before you remove the lid – it’ll settle all over your kitchen in a thin sticky layer if you don’t (not to mention breathing sugar dust is not as delicious an idea as it sounds). Whip the egg whites into a foam and, while continuing to whip, gradually add the sugar mixture until fully incorporated, then continue to whip to stiff peaks. Transfer the meringue to a piping bag fitted with a star or round tip (I like star tips for meringues but round also makes for precious kisses). Pipe kisses onto a baking sheet lined with parchment or a Silpat. You may need to use two sheets. Sprinkle a few cacao nibs onto each kiss and allow to sit for 5-10 minutes before baking to allow a skin to develop on the meringue. Bake for one hour, or until the meringues are dry on top and somewhat hollow-feeling. Turn off the oven and let the meringues sit inside for another hour or two. If they seem like they might get overdone when you turn the oven off, prop the door open while the oven cools to allow the heat to dissipate faster. Once the meringues are set and cool you can just pop them off the baking sheet and seal in an airtight container for a couple weeks – just keep away from humidity lest they become sticky (though the nibs will help keep them from sticking to one another).

These were received as well as they possibly could be. I put them in a big brown box (meant for candy and other edibles) and tied it with a lovely ribbon. I love meringues because they are pretty much the only thing I make (besides sorbets) that I can honestly answer “yes!” to when people inevitably ask “these are low-calorie, right?” (And fat free, aside from whatever’s in the nibs…which are ALSO quite healthy if you think about it!)