For girls’ night, I was in charge of dessert. I wanted to make something chocolatey and delicious, and something new with a fun little twist.
I found inspiration on Annie’s Eats. I saw her cream-filled chocolate cupcakes and knew I wanted to make them. However, I kind of pieced together my own version instead of following her exact recipe.
The end result was these little look-alike Hostess cupcakes that tasted absolutely A-MAZ-ING. Of course, seeing as how they were chocolate and all, they were quickly gobbled up at girls’ night.
Because I had such success with Hershey’s Perfectly Chocolate Cake when I made my Oreo cupcakes last month, I decided to use that recipe again for this cupcake.
For the filling, I didn’t want to use the recipe Annie had up for her cream, because it was seemingly really similar to the recipe I used for the frosting on last week’s S’mores Cupcakes. I wasn’t overly fond of the taste of the marshmallow fluff. Anyway, I went on a hunt for another “Hostess-like” cream filling, and happened to find it on another one of my favorite food blogs, Smitten Kitchen. And um, yeah. It turned out wonderfully well, and was the perfect filling for this cupcake.
For the chocolate frosting, I did end up sticking with the chocolate ganache listed with Annie’s recipe. At first, I wasn’t too sure about using semi-sweet chocolate, because I really wanted the cupcake to taste similar to (but of course, BETTER than) the original Hostess cupcake. But I went with it anyway, and this ganache did not disappoint. The only problem is that I ended up running out of it! I had 24 cupcakes and only got about 16 of them dipped before I started running low. In the end, I was able to coat 23 of the 24 cupcakes, but the last 7 of them didn’t look as smooth and nice as the others.
These cupcakes get two enthusiastic thumbs up, and are a real crowd pleaser. For the adults, they reminded us all of our childhoods. For the kids? They were just plain yummy!
Look-Alike Hostess Cupcakes
(Sources: Hershey’s, Smitten Kitchen, and Annie’s Eats)
Ingredients:
For the cupcakes:
– 2 cups sugar
– 1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
– 3/4 cup HERSHEY’S Cocoa
– 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
– 1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
– 1 teaspoon salt
– 2 eggs
– 1 cup milk
– 1/2 cup vegetable oil
– 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
– 1 cup boiling water
For the cream filling (Seven Minute Frosting):
– 2 large egg whites
– 1/2 cup sugar
– 1/4 cup light corn syrup
– 2 tablespoons water
– 1 1/2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
For the frosting:
– 1/4 cup heavy cream
– 4 oz. bittersweet chocolate, finely chopped
– 1 tbsp. unsalted butter, softened
Directions:
1. Heat oven to 350°F. Line cupcake pans with paper liners.
2. Stir together sugar, flour, cocoa, baking powder, baking soda and salt in large bowl. Add eggs, milk, oil and vanilla; beat on medium speed of mixer 2 minutes. Stir in boiling water (batter will be really thin). Fill cups about 3/4 full with batter to get bigger cupcakes.
3. Bake 22 to 25 minutes. Cool completely. (Makes 24 cupcakes.)
4. While waiting for cupcakes to cool, combine filling ingredients with a pinch of salt in a metal bowl set over a saucepan of simmering water and beat with a handheld electric mixer at high speed until frosting is thick and fluffy, 6 to 7 minutes. Remove bowl from heat and continue to beat until slightly cooled. Reserve 1/2 cup of the filling to use for piping the swirls on top of the cupcakes at the end.
5. Once cupcakes are cool, prepare a piping bag with a 1/4″ tip, and fill bag with the vanilla filling. Squeeze filling into middle of cupcakes. (Because I didn’t get the desired amount of filling into my s’mores cupcakes last week, this time, I used a different method. I basically did this, but the holes I made in the tops of my cupcakes were a bit smaller.)
6. After cupcakes are filled, begin working on the chocolate ganache frosting. In a small saucepan, heat cream over medium heat until steaming, stirring constantly. Remove from the heat, add the chocolate and let stand for 5 minutes. Add the butter and stir until smooth.
7. Transfer to a small bowl and dip the top of each cupcake to thoroughly coat.
8. Prepare another piping bag with a small tip. Fill with the reserved 1/2 cup of cream filling. Pipe swirls across the top of the cupcakes. (For Hostess accuracy, Smitten Kitchen says that there are exactly 7 swirls on top of each cupcake. I did my best to aim for seven each time, but some of my cupcakes ended up with 8. Haha!)
9. Allow chocolate ganache to set before storing. Enjoy!
I am so ridiculously excited for this weekend.
Tomorrow, I am driving the two hours to Bethany’s house for a little girls’ night/reunion with five of “the girls” from college. The six of us have not been all together since September, when we gathered the night before Bethany’s baby shower. So it has been way too long!
We don’t ever do anything when we get together, yet I thoroughly enjoy myself every single time. We’ll simply sit around a table full of food, and talk, eat, and guzzle sip wine. Quality girls’ time, I’m telling you. Oh, and there might be a certain little someone that is contributing to my excitement about this trip… a certain baby girl that I can’t wait to see!
(One of the most recent group pics I have, and it’s from July 2007 when we were all at Megan’s wedding! Must remedy the group pic situation tomorrow. Anyway, only person missing from this picture is Megan!)
I so love my girls. I mean, let’s be honest: nothing really compares to the four years spent in college. If I was going to go back and relive a period of my life, it would most certainly be college. :) So many memories…
*Saturday afternoons spent watching Lifetime movies
*Sneaking into bars while still underage
*Decorating our bathroom in our dorm suite
*Insane amounts of drinking
*Dressing up as a regiment of “Army girls” for Halloween
*Throwing crazy parties at our house
*Walking over to the dining halls in one huge pack
*Finding a random guy passed out in our front yard
*Dealing with our landlord and his battleax wife
*Did I mention the insane amounts of drinking?
SO MUCH FUN. All of which is guaranteed to be relived through our conversations tomorrow.
I am so ridiculously excited for this weekend.
(There’s Megan!)
I’ve been tagged by Lynsey over at Foster Following.
The rules of this little photo game:
Open the folder with all of your photos.
Open your 6th photo folder.
Take your 6th photo in that folder and blog it.
Write something about it.
Tag 6 fellow bloggers to do the same.
This photo is from August 2004. This isn’t the greatest photo of the bunch (there were much more exciting ones!), but I had to follow the rules. I guess I was taking pics of the stadium to document the complete view from our seats, because when this pic was taken, the players were at the other end of the field!
Anyway, I had purchased preseason Bills tickets for super cheap on ebay, and Michael and I went out and enjoyed the game (vs. the Denver Broncos) on a warm summer night. It’s good we did stuff like this then, because I can’t even imagine doing it now. This was almost five years ago, and I still had hope that the Bills would pull themselves out of a funk.
Four crappy seasons later, and I am no longer convinced. There’s very little chance in hell that I would ever make the effort to go see one of their preseason games again. We didn’t even go to a regular season game this past year, which says a lot (we ALWAYS go to at least one game a season). I’m tired of them losing! Faithful fan, yes. But I still admit that they SUCK.
My husband has informed me that free agency starts at midnight tonight, so maybe we’ll actually acquire some players WHO CAN PLAY (that’s apparently too much to ask?).
The Bills also released two of their terrible starters today. Here’s hoping for CHANGE WE CAN BELIEVE IN. (It worked for Obama. Can’t it work for the Bills, too?)
For my six people to tag, I’m going to pick six random followers. Here we go…
1. Katy at Follow Me to I Do
2. Sarah at Life as an Alex
3. Sassy Mrs.
4. Silly Monkey at Random Ramblings
5. Vanessa at Pen, Paper and Cake
6. Gia at A Life in Progress
(That just took me wayyy longer than it should have because of Blogger’s genius redesign of the whole “followers” gadget. Blogger, for the record? I hate you right now.)
I’m off to rest my aching bod. My kickboxing instructor gave us a hardcore asskicking tonight. It was ridiculous. Thank god it is almost the weekend!
Today is Ash Wednesday.
I was able to go on my lunch break to receive ashes. Lent has officially begun.
Don’t worry–I’m not about to go off about religion. I’m the last person that would ever tell someone that they should believe what I believe or that I’m right and they’re wrong. When it comes to religion, I am completely open minded.
But I’m also Catholic. I just happen to be a Catholic that thinks that a little skepticism about it all is a healthy way of thinking. I have a hard time throwing myself into religion without trying to rationally think through it all. Even though I know it’s not how I’m “supposed” to think and feel, I don’t think I will ever 100% agree with the Church and its teachings.
Does all of this make me a bad Catholic? Some would argue yes. I happen to think it just makes me human. *shrug*
Looking back on my life, I’d say I was taught to be spiritual, but not really religious. My mom was raised Catholic, and my dad was raised Baptist. My mom didn’t like the strict Catholic Church she grew up in (it’s quite a bit different now!), so she didn’t really want to raise us Catholic. As you can imagine, my dad didn’t want to either, so my brothers and I were all “dedicated” in a non-denominational church after we were born (as opposed to being baptized). I remember being taught numerous prayers and little Christian songs when I was a young child, and it was a nightly ritual to “say our prayers.” I remember my mom or my dad would sit next to my bed and we’d go through the whole family–“God bless mommy, God bless daddy, God bless Tyler, God bless Trevor”–we’d even go on to include grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins!
After my parents divorced and we moved here to New York, we became involved with a church here, and I vaguely remember the little religion groups I was a part of. While visiting my dad in Virginia in the summers, we used to attend Bible Camp with my cousins (at a Baptist Church). So we kind of got a little bit of everything in our younger years.
My mom says that eventually, she didn’t agree with the views of the church we were attending, so we just stopped going. And we never really went back. We would sometimes go to Catholic Church with my mom’s family for holidays and special occasions (baptisms, weddings, etc.), but that was it. I always continued to believe in something, just nothing really organized.
I always said that someday, when I got married, I would most likely convert to whatever religion my husband practiced (if he practiced at all). Because in a lot of ways, I’m OK with all religions. I just think it’s nice to believe in something, and be guided through life in a way. Since I grew up feeling like I didn’t really “belong” to one religion or another, I kind of always wanted to do differently for my children.
So, well, I kept my promise. When Michael and I started talking like we were really going to get married, I looked into RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults) programs so that I could become a part of the Catholic Church. Michael’s family is Catholic on both sides, and I think it meant a lot to them for me to become Catholic.
For about six months, I attended all of the RCIA classes, and then, on the night before Easter in 2007, I was baptized, confirmed, and received my first communion as part of an Easter Vigil. It was a pretty cool experience. And I was officially a member of the Catholic Church.
Michael and I attended church really regularly for a while, but in the months leading up to the wedding, we got out of the habit, and then it fell off completely. Around Christmas time, we realized that we hadn’t been to church since our wedding day. Oooops! So bad.
SO… this year, for Lent, instead of “giving up” something trivial such as soda, chocolate, or TV, we’re going to add something good back into our lives.
We’re going to go back to church on Sundays.
We know we’re supposed to be doing it anyway, but the fact is, we’re not. So this seems as good a commitment as any. And we have always been good about giving up meat on Fridays for the Lenten season.
Enough of my rambling for tonight. But I’m curious, if you observe Lent, what are you giving up (or adding) this year?
I finished this book a couple of weeks ago when we were on our way to Vegas, but haven’t taken the time to sit down and write about it until now.
But this book–what a delightful read! I loved it.
Water for Elephants is the story of Jacob Jankowski, a retired veterinarian who is 90+ years old, lonely, and living in a nursing home. When a circus comes to town, Jacob begins to reminisce about the time he spent working for a circus during The Great Depression.
Right before graduating from veterinary school at Cornell University, Jacob experiences a horrible family tragedy. His way of coping with his pain is to run away from it. He randomly hops a train and finds himself in the middle of the train-traveling Benzini Brothers Circus.
And so begins Jacob’s adventures–with the circus, exotic animals, and the people. He finds unexpected friendships, and even love.
In the book, the reader is taken back and forth between Jacob’s action-packed past with the circus, and his present, where he is frustrated that his aging body and brain are beginning to fail him. We live what he lives and feel what he feels, whether it is the awe with which he regards the circus animals, or the pain he experiences at the nursing home, having been left behind by his wife, who passed away, and his children, who have all gone on living their own lives.
The author does a wonderful job at setting this story in the middle of a Depression-era circus. So much of what makes this book great is in the details, which were apparently really well researched by Gruen. Many parts of the story are actually based on things she read and heard about the circus while preparing to write the book.
Water for Elephants is an exciting and fun novel that kept me turning the pages. It has become one of my favorites and I think it would be enjoyed by just about everyone. If you haven’t read it, definitely put this on your “must read” lists!
And, as always, if you have read it… let’s discuss in the comments!
About
I'm Heather. I'm 33 and have been married to Michael for seven years. Together, we have two beautiful little girls we love more than anything, and a miniature dachshund who drives us crazy. I'm a full-time working mom who has very little time for my own "stuff" these days, like home improvement, cooking/baking, cake decorating, and photography. Despite the team not making the playoffs since 1999, I'm STILL a Buffalo Bills fan, which I think speaks to my loyalty AND sense of humor. I can't wait to pick up the pace with travel again some day... you know, when we're done being ruled by tiny fists. Welcome to my blog.
