Strawberry x Oreo Cupcakes

A few weeks ago, I had planned to bake some cupcakes for my best friend. He wanted either some REALLY fruity cupcakes or Oreo cupcakes. So I started to try baking some really fruity cupcakes with fruity frosting, but the results didn’t satisfy me, which made me decide to stay with the good old and foolproof (at least so I thought at that time) Oreo cupcakes. But then, I somehow managed to truly mess up the frosting. It was too sweet and didn’t have the right consistency – kind of flaky instead of creamy, not really tasty as frosting.

So I had to improvise and make another frosting quickly. When realizing I didn’t have enough ingredients for making the oreo frosting once again and shops were already closed, I slightly started to panic … but then, I found these lovely strawberries in the refridgerator. Remembering that should also be some white chocolate somewhere in the cupboard, I started to make a new frosting – a fruity one this time. Luckily, this one turned 0ut to be just the way I had imagined – creamy, refreshing and not overly sweet. The taste of the strawberries fits wonderfully with the white chocolate and because the whole frosting is rather light, it complements the rich chocolate muffin underneath very well.

Part 1: Oreo Cupcakes (adapted from A Cup Full of Cake) makes about 15 cupcakes

Ingredients: 60g (= about 2 ounces) bittersweet chocolate, roughly chopped (or chocolate chips) 12 Oreo cookies (plus some more, in case you break a few while trying to twist off the bottoms!) 1 large egg (at room temperature) 1/2 cup whole milk 3/8 cup vegetable oil 1/2 tbsp vanilla 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour 1 cup granulated sugar 1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder 1 tsp baking powder 1 good pinch of salt 1/3 cup water, heated to boiling

Preheat oven to 180 degrees C/350 degrees F. Melt the chocolate in a water bath (bain marie). When melted completely, set the chocolate aside and let cool a little. Line a cupcake tin with paper liners. Carefully twist of the tops of the oreo cookies and place the half with the filling in the cupcake liners. The remaining cookie tops aren’t needed in this recipe, you could just eat them while baking In a large bowl, whisk eggs until light and foamy. Add milk, oil and vanilla and mix well. Next, add the melted and slightly cooled chocolate and whisk together. In another bowl, combine flour, sugar, cocoa powder, baking powder and salt. Then put these dry ingredients into the bowl with the egg mixture and whisk until well combined. Add the boiling water and mix again until combined. Fill the dough into the cupcake liners (about 2/3 full, do not overfill!) and bake them about 15 minutes or until a toothpick inserted comes out clean. Let the cupcakes cool completely before frosting.

Part 2: Strawberry frosting makes more than enough for about 15 cupcakes

Ingredients: 200g white chocolate, chopped about 300g strawberries + some more for decorating 100g butter

Melt the white chocolate in a water bath. Meanwhile, clean the strawberries and cut a few into 1-2mm thin slices. Put these aside for decorating. Blend the rest of the strawberries in a food processor until completely pureed. When the chocolate is molten, add about 8 tbsps of the strawberry puree, one spoonful at a time. Add pieces of the butter also one piece at a time, alternating with the strawberry purree. Mix with a handmixer until the frosting is all smooth. It should be creamy but not too liquid. If it’s too liquid, add a little more butter, if it doesn’t taste strawberry-ish enough, add a little more strawberry puree and another piece of butter. When the frosting is ready, fill into a piping bag with star-shaped tip and frost the cupcakes immediately. Put a mini oreo cookie and a strawberry slice on top of each cupcake for decorating (or simply decorate them in some other way ) I usually do this by frosting a cupcake, storing the piping bag with the frosting in the refridgerator while adding the decoration, then put the finished cupcake into the refridgerator, take out the frosting and frost the next cupcake. This way, the frosting doesn’t get too liquid!

Sunday’s Seven

When I transfered pictures from my camera to my PC today, I came across a few older pics in my photo library, which somehow never managed to get onto my blog but are definitely worth sharing! So today’s Sunday’s Seven is about food photography – seven snapshots – once again.

Frozen Blueberry Double Cheesecake with blueberry sauce topping. I ate this at Amacha, Tsuzuki-ku in Japan last summer. Apart from how adorable this cake looks, the frozen cheese cream and berries tasted unbelievably good on a hot summer day!

Soymilk Crepes with homemade red currant and vanilla jam and bananas. This was one of the meals I made with friends at about 4 o’clock in the morning after coming home from a college party. Believe me, there’s nothing better than making some brownies, crepes or other sweets spontaneously in the middle of the night and enjoying them with friends!

Maple walnut cake with marzipan. I made this cake for my boyfriend’s birthday and he loved it. It’s a walnut and maple syrup cake, filled and frosted with chocolate ganache and coated and decorated with marzipan. For those of you who speak German – here‘s the recipe

Now and then, my friends and I allow ourselved a nice evening with wine, bread and cheese. (Of course nothing fancy – we’re poor students, but still some yummy things!) On one of those evenings, I took this picture of a wine glass with the bottle in the background, which somehow reminds me of the relaxed and feel-like-home atmosphere of sitting together with friends. Maybe that’s why I like this picture so much!

Hirame sashimi (raw flounder) at “Kihara” in Sapporo, Japan. The chef served the sashimi with spicy-flavoured grated radish and soy sauce with chopped chives. As far as I experienced, Hirame is usually very mild, not to say bland sometimes. But this Hirame was so soft, melted in your mouth and although flavoured with the radish and soy sauce you could still taste the fish’s taste of its own. 

Heart-shaped nama chocolates with almonds. I made these for valentine’s day and took a lot more photographs than I actually posted in the end. This is one of the pictured that weren’t featured in the post but which I still like pretty much.

Triple chocolate dessert at “dominique saibron” in Futakotamagawa, Tokyo. It included chocolate mousse, chocolate ice cream and a small chocolate cake with liquid center. And yep, it was as good as it looks and sounds like! 

Hope all of you had a great weekend! I spent mine visiting the farmer’s market and cooking and eating a lot, for example at a russian birthday celebration today which meant mountains of good food! Unfortunately, my camera’s battery decided to die just at the moment I wanted to take pictures …  So I’d better check the battery twice before going out to eat the next time. What food things happened to you this weekend?

Carrot muffins

Last weekend’s “Sunday’s Seven” was supposed to be all about easter treats. I had planned on writing a beautiful post, but when I sat down in the evening after a wonderful but also very long and exhausting easter day I realized that blogging felt like a commitment. It wasn’t fun anymore but something that had to be done, one of those tasks on my to-do list. So I decided to skip blogging last sunday and to write a belated easter post today – without the feeling of having to do this, but writing it because I’ve got something I want to write about.

In my opinion, blogging doesn’t make sense if you sit down and try to think of something you could write about. You have to be passionate about whatever you share. So the thing I want to share with you today is a recipe for these cuties:

Remember these adorable carrot muffins I made last year for easter breakfast? Well, I made them once again this year (and probably will be making them again next year), because they’re so good! Healthy (in comparison to other cakes), soft, juicy and nutty with a hint of cinnamon. They’re just perfect for breakfast. Or simply as a snack when having a coffee … or at any other time of the day

Carrot muffins (adapted from chefkoch.de) makes about 12-15 muffins

Ingredients: 4 egg whites 4 egg yolks 120g brown sugar 3 tbsps. water, heated to boiling 250g (about 2 cups) grated carrots 100g ground hazelnuts 100g flour 2 good pinches cinnamon 1 tsp. baking powder for decorating: about 120g icing sugar a few tbsps. water 12-15 small marzipan carrots

Preheat oven to 160 degrees C. Line a cupcake tin with cupcake liners. Put egg yolks and sugar into a bowl, add hot water and whisk until pale and creamy. Carefully fold the shredded carrots into the egg mixture. In another bowl, combine ground hazelnuts, flour, cinnamon and baking powder. Then put the dry ingredients into the bowl with the egg-carrot mixture and mix carefully. Beat egg whites until firm and then fold them into the batter as well. Fill the batter into the cupcake liners and bake for 20 minutes or until a toothpick inserted comes out clean. Let the muffins cool a little before icing. Put icing sugar into a small bowl and add water spoon by spoon until the icing has the right consistency. It should be liquid but still rather viscous, not watery. Decorate the muffins with icing and put a marzipan carrot on top of each.

Sunday’s Seven

It doesn’t feel right to blog only once a week, every Sunday. But as sad as it is, I simply don’t have time for much baking and blogging at the moment, because of my upcoming exams next week. So for today, here are seven glimpses of my past week for you:

A donut topped with chocolate chip cookie dough – heavenly! Devoured this cutie here at Krispy Kreme in Shibuya.

My very first home-made udon (japanese noodle soup). I made this with shoyu and dashi based broth and added steamed carrots, soy bean sprouts with shrimps, finely chopped spring onions and sesame as toppings.

Remember how I wrote about this wonderful little restaurant where people are like one big family, sharing food and enjoy it together? I had the opportunity to go there once again, and to take a picture of Baba, the owner of this place this time. Doesn’t she look exactly like an auntie who enjoys nothing as much as cooking for her children and grand-children?

Chocolixir by Godiva. The name speaks for itself – it’s chocolicious! Although the strawberry-and-chocolate version I chose was nearly a bit too sweet, even for my sweet tooth!

I also ate some very good sushi at Momotaro in Tokyo this week. Above you can see their Anago I-kan Nigiri (believe me, it’s just Yum!) and below is a snap of the place itself. Love how the single sushi varieties they offer are listed on these single sheets of paper!

And finally, today, I had my first coffee sitting outside in bright sunlight this year! I went to my favourite cafe with a friend, enjoyed the sunshine and took a break from studying for a few hours.

Hope that all of you had a nice weekend as well! But now, I’ll really have to get back to – yep, you guessed it right – studying for those exams. Can’t wait for them to be over and to bake and blog again!

Sunday’s Seven

About two or three years ago, I was looking up how to make macarons au chocolat on the internet and found David Lebovitz’s recipe. After reading the recipe a few times, I also read the rest of the blog post, searching for more advice. That’s when I stumbled into food blogging.

Having read this post, I read more posts and then more food blogs. I loved how so many people all over the world shared my passion for food. I loved (and still do today) the stories behind the recipes and the creativity people put into discovering new dishes and food styling. So today, I want to share seven of my favourite food blogs with you. I’ve been following a few of these blogs for a while now, and there are also some which I discovered only recently.

Sunday’s Seven

Today, I’d like to introduce kawaii kitchen’s new blogging series: Sunday’s seven! Every sunday, I’m going to share seven things that inspired me during the past week, seven things I like or which seem otherwise interesting To start with – here are my seven favorites of the food pictures I took last week.

Seki-Aji sashimi at Torihiro (a small Yakitori & Sushi Restaurant) in Hiyoshi, Kanagawa. The chef and his wife always serve best quality foods and sometimes specialties from southern Japan, like this Seki-Aji and Seki-Saba, which can only be caught in the waters of the strait which separates Shikoku from Kyushu.

Memories of March 11th 2011

Today, my heart goes out to all the victims and people who suffered from last year’s earthquake, the tsunami that followed and the nuclear catastrophy in Japan. It is still hard to find appropriate words to write about this topic.

Happy belated birthday, Oreo!

Two days ago was the 100th anniversary of Oreo cookies. Who doesn’t know them, and who doesn’t love those chocolatey, crunchy little treats? And today, I spotted these “Oreo soft cookies” at a convenience store here in Japan. Being curious about how they taste as I had never seen or even tried them before, I bought a package to celebrate the Oreo anniversary, even though it’s slightly belated.

Baking therapy on valentine’s day

My valentine’s day wasn’t so nice this year, but I managed to save what was left of the day by some baking therapy: I made small, heart-shaped chocolate cakes using this recipe (I reduced the cooking time to 20 minutes, and replaced the frosting with some simple chocolate covering) to relax and calm down. Baking makes me feel like home, no matter where I am. It’s relaxing to stand in the kitchen, to concentrate only on preparing the ingredients, mixing them into a batter and to forget about anything else for a moment.

One year of kawaii kitchen – a new year’s resolution

It’s somehow ironic that ever since I started studying nutrition, I didn’t get to blog about my cooking and baking anymore.

Of course, I baked a couple of brownies and simple stuff like that now and then, but nothing really fancy or special which I felt like blogging about. I started to write several posts but always ended up admitting to myself that whatever I had written got boring or wasn’t worth sharing because I somehow lacked excitement and passion either for writing or the food I was writing about.

So one of my new year’s resolutions for the next year of kawaii kitchen is to bake and cook more of those things that I always wanted to try or things that seem interesting to me, so that I have something to blog about. For this, I created a “want to do and have to try out” – list, which you can find here.

In the meantime, until I get to complete my tasks, here are a few pictures of things I baked during the last few months.