Page 270 Fresh Flower-Topped Pound Cakes

"There's no need to perfect your piping skills to create beautiful flower-topped cupcakes. Instead, adorn them with a few fresh, edible flowers. Some of the best-tasting varieties include masturtiums, pansies, hibiscus, snapdragons, violets and marigolds. Use only flowers grown without pesticieds, either from your own organice garden or from specialty suppliers. When making the little ppound cakes, remember to cream the butter and sugar thoroughly to produce the right texture." - Martha

How many of you have ever bought a particular item from the grocer to use in a special recipe, but by the time you actually got around to doing what you talked yourself into, that item was wilted, or molded, or dried up, or whatever? Well, I had purchased some pansies from a friend's son's fundraiser and I purposefully did not plant all of them because I didn't want the rabbits getting them or bugs eating them before I got a chance to use them. So here's my chance. I go to my laundry room window where I have decided they would get good sunlight so they'd be perfect by the time I needed to decorate with the flowers. A few days go by, then a week or two before I make these cupcakes (too many other non-necessities got in the way) and now the flowers are dried up. As ugly as sin itself! I went out into the yard where I had placed the other pansies; left to the submission of the elements and the critters, they are gone too. Bummer!

I made the pound cakes and they turned out great! But since my attempt at fresh-flowers went awry, I simply chose to decorate them with a buttery-rich cream frosting. But as an experiment I also took the time to make some almond paste, and I filled each cake with a dollup of the paste. These pound cakes remind me of buttery-rich croissants and almond croissants have continued to make the top of my patisserie list. It really melded as a perfect match.

Page 148 Chocolate Salted-Caramel Mini Cupcakes

"Salted caramels, including chocolate varieties, have become quite popular in recent years; a touch of salt draws out caramels buttery taste and highlights the sweetness. This cupcake, created with the candy's popularity in mind, serves as an excellent incentive to try your hand at making caramel at home. The soft caramel centers hide under a piped peak of satiny chocolate frosting. Fleur de sel, a type of sea salt prized for its distinctive flavor, is avaliable at specialty stores; if you can't find it, you may substitute another sea salt, such as maldon." - Martha

The recipe was easy enough to make for the cupcakes. At first the batter didn't look like it was going to make 56 mini cupcakes, but upon filling the paper liners, there was plenty. It actually made 64. I didn't have any buttermilk; you remember I only bought a bit for that one special recipe so I used a mix of heavy whipping cream and 1% milk. It was just fine. OK, so who has the time to go and search out Fleur de sel Sea Salt? I don't. I did have sea salt at home, but it wasn't that or Maldon. It was simple sea salt and did the job nicely.

I made the caramel suggested "Salted Caramel Filling" on page 322, but what a disaster! Even though I do make home-made caramel on a regular basis, this was a completely different way to make it. I paid extreme attention to the recipe and something went WAY wrong! When I boiled the mixture until it reached 360 degrees, then removed it from the heat and added the cream, the whole thing just globbed up on my spoon and left a bit of liquid-not-quite-caramel in the bowl that wouldn't have anything to do with becoming a good product. Certainly, it was not of the picture perfect quality that shows in Martha's photo. This recipe is very transluscent and the caramels I make are opaque. So I trashed that bowl's concoction and made my own successful caramel for the center of my cupcakes. As my photo shows, the caramel is very creamy and tasty indeed.