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This past weekend Maheen and I volunteered our apartment for a book club (more about the book at the end of the post). Of course any sort of gathering can only mean one thing… a chance to try out new recipes! Yeayy! This was just the opportunity my new Home Baking with the CIA cookbook was begging for I had full intentions to try out the Devils food cake with fudge icing recipe, yellow butter cake with citrus icing, and the profiterole recipe. Now we all know I tried out the Barefoot Contessa’s recipe for profiteroles in the past few weeks with mixed results, so I was really excited to see how the CIA recipe would hold up. But then, the inevitable happened – I ran out of time.
Three of my closest friends have all had babies in the past month and because of my darn cold, I have barely gotten time to see them! Out of the three, I had only met one! So instead of prepping Saturday night, I went out to see my friends A fair exchange in my opinion.
Sunday morning dawned grey and dreary, but it was plenty warm and cozy in our apartment. I figured I would give the cakes a go first since the recipes were similar and I could just pop them in the oven. I’ve learned (the hard way) that measuring out all your ingredients before you start mixing is the way to go. Saves so much time and energy!
I started with the yellow butter cake, and OH MY WORD it smelled DIVINE! I snuck a lick from the bowl after I had finish filling my cupcake liners. Pure. Heaven. And I’m a chocolate girl, so that’s saying something Next I started on the devils food recipe. Now I already have a tried and true recipe for chocolate cupcakes, but I wanted to see how CIA would stack up against Martha Stewart. Most of the ingredients were the same, though the order and quantities were different. With a shrug I continued on.
As the aroma of freshly baked cakes filled the kitchen, I started in on the frostings. Mind you, it was about 2pm by this point, and the group was scheduled to come in by 4pm! Eeeek! I hurriedly whipped up a basic buttercream and added some lemon zest and lemon juice to give it a citrus kick. Best. Frosting. Ever. If you haven’t tried a citrus buttercream, you are missing out! This was also the first time I was making a fudge frosting. I’m more of a cream cheese or buttercream base kind of girl. I don’t know what made me think I should try 4-5 new recipes in one day, but I was definitely starting to feel it by this point. The fudge frosting came out a bit bitter, but when I started adding more sugar to even it out, it became too sweet. I don’t know… just didn’t click for me.
Of course by this time I had no time to whip up profiteroles, so I pushed that recipe to another day. I frosted both sets of cupcakes and handed out a few to the book club hosts / discussion leaders (Moumita and Dinu) to give them a try. Results?
* Yellow butter cupcake – good taste and aroma, just way too dense and thick! I may have left them in the oven too long or creamed the butter incorrectly. When I ran a search for this recipe, others seemed to love it. I’m going to give this another try.
* Citrus buttercream – HUGE HIT! This one is a keeper
* Devils food chocolate cupcake – failure. Straight to the trash. The cake stuck to the liners, never fully reached that ‘chocolately’ color, and just tasted wrong.
* Fudge icing – epic failure.

Here are some pics of each of the leftovers!

The book we read was Zeitoun by Dave Eggers. Three words – read this book! I knew Eggers was a good writer, but I don’t think I ever fully appreciated his writing until I read Zeitoun. It was simple enough so that I didn’t have to pause and look things up or reference previous sections of the book, but complex enough so that you really feel like you see the community and neighborhood, and feel the happiness, anxiety, and love between each of the relationships. Check out the reviews written by Haroon Moghul for Religion Dispatches, Jordan Robinson for altmuslim, and Wajahat Ali for Huffington Post.