Bakery Review: Sprinkles Cupcakes

Sprinkles Cupcakes - visited September 6, 2014

I'm very fond of Sprinkles. It has the distinction of being the first cupcakery ever opened, at least according to Cupcake Wars where Sprinkles' founder Candace Nelson serves as a judge. I'd heard about it being open in Beverly Hills but since that's not my usual 'hood, I didn't expect to add Sprinkles to my treat list. At least not until they opened a shop in my area several years ago. It's still a bit far to drive for a cupcake but when they first opened. I joined the throngs lining up to fork over $3.75 for a cupcake.

I still remember that first visit (or, er, those first visits) in the early months of Sprinkles' opening at Stanford Mall. The line went out the door. Dozens of people lined the sidewalks, waiting for their turn to get inside the shop. When you do finally make it in, you line up against a short display length of cupcakes on offer that day and when it's your turn, the counter people write down your name and your order then someone fills your order and rings you up. Sprinkles has some core flavors offered daily then "special" flavors that are rotated on different days of the week and, for the more rare, every day for a certain length of time during the year, usually a few weeks.

They give you a flavor card so you can see which flavors are on offer on any given day of the week. Red Velvet is always on offer and what I first came to know Sprinkles for. Subsequent visits also allowed me to sample the banana cupcake with cream cheese frosting (my favorite), the peanut butter, the coconut, the orange, the pumpkin....well, you get the drift. That first year, I probably visited Sprinkles more times than I care to admit. It couldn't be helped though. It's not like you can load up on cupcakes. I'd like to tell you in my best portion-control voice that it's because each cupcake has approximately 550 calories and I didn't want to consume more than 1 on any given day as almost a third of my daily caloric allotment.

Of course, truth of the matter is, while I do believe in portion control, I also believe more firmly in only eating yummy, delicious, empty calories when they're fresh. Best to go every once in awhile and get 1 fresh cupcake than to stock up and eat subsequent ones when they're no longer at their peak goodness. I can be greedy but I'm greedy with discrimination.

Nowadays, the cupcake craze has faded somewhat and competition has opened around Sprinkles so they're no longer the only game in town. Now, on my most recent visit, there was hardly any line at all and only a few people in the shop on a Saturday morning.

I hadn't been to Sprinkles in awhile so instead of torturing myself with which flavor to choose, I went with the classic Red Velvet. I credit Sprinkles with nurturing my love of good red velvet. Plus I had a copycat recipe for Sprinkles Red Velvet Cupcakes that I was going to try out later that day and I wanted to get a taste of the real thing so I had something to compare to. Again, I go that extra cupcake mile to further my baking research.

Sprinkles has the iconic dot on their cupcakes and it's probably the only thing I never eat. It's pretty, it lets you know you're eating a Sprinkles cupcake but it adds nothing to my flavor palate to eat it so I don't.

I also credit Sprinkles with being one of the few places where I'll actually eat the frosting on the cupcake. Normally I don't because they'll either be too airy like whipped cream or too greasy or too sweet. But I like Sprinkles' frosting. I still can't eat all of it but it's a mark of how well I like it that I scrape less frosting off a Sprinkles cupcake than I do other cupcakes :).

Some people find Sprinkles cupcakes too greasy but I just consider them moist. Yeah, they probably have a ton of butter. Those 550 calories per cupcake have to come from somewhere. I like the texture of Sprinkles as well. I hadn't had a red velvet cupcake from them in awhile (more than a year? I'm slacking) and for some reason the one I got didn't taste as good as I remembered. Hmm, I don't know what that's about. The texture was still good but the flavor wasn't very chocolaty or red velvet-y. Maybe I should've gotten the banana or gone on a day when the orange was available. Something to remember for next time.

In any case, if you do find yourself in the neighborhood of a Sprinkles, I would definitely recommend giving them a try. Even though the cupcake craze has passed, I still enjoy a good one once in awhile.

Chocolate Rads

Chocolate Rads - made August 17, 2014 from The Model Bakery Cookbook by Karen Mitchell and Sarah Mitchell Hansen

This recipe didn't turn out exactly as I had envisioned. But that was my fault. I'd made the dough, following the recipe to the letter but it turned out to be somewhat liquid, more like a cake batter than a cookie dough. Which of course has the power to sufficiently freak me out. With so much chocolate in the batter, the best thing to do is chill and let it set. Then it should have stiffened enough to portion into cookie dough balls.

I tried that, I really did. But after half an hour in the refrigerator, I was only able to scoop out less than a dozen "balls" that threatened to flatten before they froze sufficiently in the freezer. So I decided to hedge my bets and poured the remaining batter (seriously, it was batter) into an 8-inch baking pan and treated them like brownies.

In hindsight, they somewhat turned out as brownies - just on the rich and fudgy side. Which is not a bad thing, mind you. Except....what with beating the mixture so much after the eggs are added, the top formed a substantial crust, bringing out the meringue properties of highly beaten eggs. I don't like meringues or crusts on my brownies. These didn't cut cleanly because of the crust. But underneath it was fine. Just take small bites as you fill up on your chocolate quota.

And the ones I managed to make as cookies? Far better than as brownies. The cookies also formed a crust but not as thick as on the brownies. In cookie form, the crust made for a nice texture contrast with the soft fudginess of the inside of the cookie. It was still rich so I'd advise making these small. I used a large cookie scoop and mine came out too large. I ate a third of the cookie at a time. There was a time when I could down a rich cookie and keep on truckin' but alas, those days are gone. Bummer.

2/3 cup (95 g) unbleached all-purpose flour
2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon fine sea salt
1 pound/455 g semisweet chocolate (55% cacao or less), finely chopped
4 tablespoons (55 g) unsalted butter, room temperature
1 2/3 cups (330 g) sugar
4 large eggs, room temperature
1 tablespoon cold brewed espresso or 1 teaspoon instant espresso dissolved in 1 tablespoon boiling water and cooled
2 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 cups (340 g) semisweet chocolate chips

1. Sift the flour, baking powder and salt together in a small bowl; set aside.
2. Melt the one pound of semisweet chocolate and butter in the top half of a double boiler set over barely simmering water. Stir until melted and smooth. 
3. Beat the sugar and eggs in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the whisk attachment on high speed until mixture is fluffy, thick and pale yellow, about 5 minutes. Beat in the espresso and vanilla.
4. Reduce the mixer speed to low. Add the melted chocolate-butter until blended; do not overmix.
5. Add the flour mixture until incorporated. Stir in the chocolate chips. Chill for at least 30 minutes.
6. Scoop into small to medium-size dough balls. Chill or freeze for several hours or overnight.
7. When ready to bake, preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Bake for 15-20 minutes until the tops of the cookies are cracked and the edges are beginning to crisp. Remove from oven and cool completely.

Restaurant Review: Thai Kitchen

Thai Kitchen - lunch on August 24, 2014

My parents and I tried out a new Thai restaurant after church a few weeks ago. We don’t normally go Thai since there aren’t that many Thai options in their town and my parents tend to prefer Chinese or Filipino food. But they’d seen Thai Kitchen for awhile and wanted to try it. I love pad thai so I was happy to try out a new place for it.

We arrived early for lunch and the restaurant was empty. It was actually a pretty decent size for a restaurant and I hope they do more business at other times. We had a very attentive server who seated us and took our order; she was friendly and welcoming which is always nice.

Spring Rolls - $5.95

We started with an appetizer of fried spring rolls, I got my usual pad thai, my dad went with the Beef Fried Rice and my mom got a noodle dish with the wide, flat noodles you normally get with pad see ew. We all shared our dishes family-style; the portions were very generous, considering the $7.95 price point for each order. I liked the pad thai. It was similar to the pad thai from my favorite Thai Restaurant, Krung Thai, and was slightly cheaper. 

Beef Fried Rice - $7.95

Chicken Rard-Nah: $7.95

My mom’s Chicken Rard-Nah was on the spicy side so it wasn’t my favorite but if you like spicy, this is a good option. The beef fried rice had a lot of rice but there was also a decent amount of beef. I also liked that the fried rice was moist and seemed to be made with “fresh rice”, i.e. not leftover, day old steamed rice.  But my favorite was the fried spring rolls – yum. They were crisp but also chewy, tasted great and weren’t too greasy. I could’ve eaten half the plate. For $5.95, it was a great deal.

Pad Thai - $7.95

I liked Thai Kitchen based on what we tried and would definitely go back.

Double Triple Oreo Brownies

Double Triple Oreo Brownies - made September 1, 2014, recipe adapted from Yammie's Noshery

Although I've been getting some intermittent baking in, unless my freezer is stocked with cookie dough and slabs of brownies or individually wrapped slices of cake residing in freezer bags, I feel unprepared. Unprepared for what, I'm not exactly sure. Armageddon? I'm sure we're all going to need sweets then. I know I will. Still, I like having a well-stocked freezer for when I have social occasions and I need to pass out goodie bags or if I'm moved to send a care package.

When that happens, the best thing to do is find a brownie recipe that makes a 9 x 13 pan. That yields plenty of brownies for future needs. I also happened to have a package of Double Triple Oreos that's been sitting in my pantry begging to be used. In case you've never heard of the Double Triple Oreo, it's a three cookie Oreo with two cookies sandwiching the original vanilla cream filling and the third cookie enclosing a chocolate creme layer to make one fat cookie. These Oreo people are brilliant. I bought the package in a moment of weakness, thinking I'd try them out before baking with them. Then I forgot about them for awhile. Until now.

The original recipe only called for chocolate chips to be added to the brownies but I conveniently ignored that for my Oreo add-in. You actually can't tell by looking at the picture that I put in the Oreos but they're there. The chocolate cookie part is evident to the sharp eye but the particular pieces I took a picture of didn't have the vanilla creme filling in the visible edges of the brownie. I only had a small piece of this to taste test and I didn't really get an Oreo chunk in it so I don't know if my experimental add-in really added anything. The brownie itself is good although, with the chocolate coming from the cocoa and the chemical leavening being baking powder, it was lighter and more cakey than I preferred my brownies to be. It was still good though and my freezer temporarily held some advance preparation for the end of the world.

I say temporarily because they're gone now. I decided to frost them with Nutella and, because I don't believe in being subtle, I sprinkled the remaining Double Triple Oreos over them and brought them into work today. So they're really gone. Armageddon will have to wait.

2 sticks of butter
2 1/4 cups of sugar
4 large eggs 
1 tablespoon vanilla
1 1/4 cups of cocoa powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
2 "sleeves" of Double Triple Oreos, cut into chunks

1. Grease a 9x13 in. pan. and preheat the oven to 350º.
2. Mix together the butter and sugar in a microwave safe bowl. Heat in the microwave, stirring about every 30 seconds, until the mixture is bubbly and smooth (you can also do it on the stove top if you want). Add in the eggs and vanilla and beat until smooth. 
3. Mix together the cocoa powder, salt, baking powder, and flour and add to the butter mixture, mixing until smooth. Stir in the chocolate chips. 
4. Pour the batter into the pan. Bake for about 28 minutes. 

Marceline's Confectionery Shop - Downtown Disney

Marceline's Confectionery Shop - visited August 30, 2014

My third and last Disney post from last weekend: as part of my walking rounds on the Saturday of the half marathon weekend, I just happened to come across a confectionery shop in Downtown Disney. You know, like a moth to a flame. It was early enough that I had the shop almost entirely to myself as it was too early for the sweets-loving crowd to show up and eat chocolate. I myself try not to derail my good eating intentions until at least after lunch but that’s not to say I can’t look at sweets, at any time of the day. And take copious pictures of them.

I didn’t buy anything then but after spending a few hours at Disneyland (all I could manage in the heat plus my friend and I rode the rides we wanted to ride), I did stop by on my way back to my hotel. On my weekend bucket list, I knew I wanted to eat something Mickey-shaped. Sounds silly, I know, but when in Rome…

The thing I've discovered about the whole Disney franchise is nothing's really unique within the parks' territory. By that I mean, that mouthwatering truffle or that fat snickerdoodle you saw in a bakery cafe is also more than likely available at other Disney outlets within the park and in Downtown Disney. Fudge by the piece at Marceline's? You can also get it by the tray in stores within Disneyland and California Adventures. I only make this point to give reassurance that should you miss one thing somewhere, never fear, you can easily find it again elsewhere as long as you're within the Disney sphere. Just once you leave Disney, it would be harder to find but within it, it's everywhere.

At Marceline's, I went with a mini Mickey turtle – caramel and pecans enrobed in milk chocolate and roughly shaped to look like Mickey’s head. Close enough. I also chose an English toffee square. I’m a sucker for toffee.

The bottom is dipped in white chocolate and rolled in red sanding sugar

As part of the confectionery shop, there’s also a display window for people to gawk at several employees putting the decorating touches on the candy apples. I loved watching them turn candy apples into artistic masterpieces and they did it so efficiently and quickly, you figure they had to have had a lot of practice and experience.

 All in all, it was a fun shop to visit. Lots of temptations but I stuck to my two calorie bombs and called it a day. The mini Mickey turtle was good, the caramel was the perfect texture and consistency, not too soft or too chewy. I would’ve preferred a turtle with almonds instead of pecans but it was still good. But the toffee was my favorite. It wasn’t so hard that your teeth were in danger of cracking when you took a bite but still had a good snap. Plus it was covered in milk chocolate and rolled in chopped toasted almonds. Really, that’s my idea of a perfect confection. Good thing I was going to run 13.1 miles the next day. After finishing that huge square, I was going to need the calorie burn.

Mickey-shaped caramel pecan turtle

English Toffee - best ever