What fruit is for: Chocolate raspberry cupcakes

photo via Flickr

These cupcakes come from food blog Pie of the Tiger, and if you couldn't tell by looking at them, they're not just any chocolate raspberry cupcakes. They're:

Chocolate raspberry cupcakes with three types of ganache made from three types of good chocolate: Valrhona-raspberry inside the raspberries, Scharffen Berger for the filling, and Michel Cluizel ganache frosting on top.

Wow!


photo via Flickr

There are some amazing, amazing photos in the post, along with the reasons for the three kinds of chocolate and a step-by-step photo illustration of the chocolate insertion process. The recipe came from Martha Stewart's Cupcakes.

I tend to trust Martha Stewart recipes, and Martha definitely didn’t fail me this time. I used the Devil’s Food Cupcakes recipe for these, and they were perfect for the purpose: not so chocolatey that they’d just seem like an extension of all the ganache I was planning to utilize, but not watered down like so many chocolate baked goods are. The texture was so soft and moist–in the recipe’s description, they attribute this to sour cream–and they were divine both warm from the oven and cooled down and decorated. (For reference, the recipe yielded 18 normal-sized cupcakes and 24 mini cupcakes. The baking time was spot on for my oven, with a five minute deduction to the time when baking the mini cupcakes.)

I baked them Friday night and then set about decorating them Saturday morning. First thing, I washed the raspberries and laid them out to dry on a cooling rack covered in paper towels, making sure that there was no water inside or out because the raspberries were going to be surrounded by ganache and water is a great way to invite mold into your chocolates. I made my raspberry ganache, so it would have a little time to set up to a pipeable consistency before I started filling the cupcakes. I improvised the recipe, and the formula is easy to remember: 8 oz. of dark chocolate (Valrhona in this case), 8 oz. of cream, and 8 oz. of raspberry preserves. I put the preserves straight into the cream as I heated it to simmering, mixing to combine the two, and strained it over the chocolate to keep the seeds out of the ganache.


photo via Flickr