Chocolate Cupcakes with Raspberry Frosting

When my tomboy daughter was three, she became obsessed with princesses.  She no longer responded to her own name, but asked that she be called Cinderella.  No outfit was complete without a tiara and a wand.  She favored big, poufy, dresses, which she called “ballerinas.”  And the pink, oh my god, the pink.  Everything had to be pink.

And although I had spent 40 years not thinking much about it, all of this turned me into a raving feminist.  I blame Disney.  Cinderella – a movie my daughter watched incessantly – might be the worst movie ever made.  Cinderella is pretty and has a nice singing voice, but she has no discernable personality.  Her stepsisters are unrelievedly stupid, ugly, talentless and mean, but Cinderella cheerfully complies with their relentless demands.  Cinderella’s mother is dead, of course, because in Disney ALL the mothers are dead.  (Why?  What happened to the writers at Disney that they feel compelled to kill off all of the mothers?  It’s disturbing.)  And her stepmother is downright evil.   Cinderella herself is so dumb that she doesn’t realize that the man she danced with at the ball – the only man at the ball – was in fact the prince.  The moral to the story is clear: if you’re pretty, and you wear pretty things, you can marry rich, and never have to do anything again for the rest of your life.   Which doesn’t sit well with the mom who grew up on “Free to Be, You and Me,” has a graduate degree and a full-time job, and thinks life is probably better that way, thank you very much.

So when my daughter’s fourth birthday rolled around, she of course wanted pink cupcakes.  She told me she wanted pink cake, but I interpreted that to mean chocolate cake, because she loves chocolate.  No problem there.  But when she said she wanted pink frosting, I knew she meant it.

The obvious choice would have been vanilla buttercream frosting with a few drops of red dye.  The trouble is that I really don’t like vanilla buttercream frosting.  It’s too sweet, too flat, too one-note.  So I figured there must be a way to give the frosting some flavor while turning it pink.

That’s when I thought of jam.  Sure enough, I dropped a few spoonfuls of seedless raspberry jam into the frosting, and backed off the sugar, and I had something more flavorful, less insipid, than plain old vanilla frosting.  And it was pink!  Joy all around.

The chocolate cupcake recipe I use is a Martha Stewart recipe I found that I’ve tweaked a little.  It’s my kind of recipe, because it basically calls for you to throw all the ingredients into a bowl and mix it together.  The vegetable oil threw me, I admit, as did the fact that the batter was so loose that I had to use a ladle to get it into the muffin cups.  There is no earthly reason why this recipe should produce moist, delicious cupcakes, but, by some magic trick, it always does. 

CHOCOLATE CUPCAKES WITH RASPBERRY FROSTING

 For the cupcakes:

 2 cups white sugar

½ cup brown sugar

3 cups all purpose flour

1 ½ cups unsweetened cocoa powder

1 Tbs baking soda

1 ½ tsp baking powder

1 ½ tsp salt

1 ½ cups buttermilk

¾ cup vegetable oil

3 large eggs

1 ½ tsp vanilla extract

3 Tbs brewed coffee

3/4 cup warm water

Preheat oven to 350.  In a large bowl, mix together sugars, flour, cocoa powder, baking soda, baking powder, and salt.  Add buttermilk, vegetable oil, coffee and water.  Blend together.  Then blend in eggs and vanilla.

Ladle batter into muffin cups (it will be very liquidy) and bake until a toothpick comes out clean, with crumbs, 20-25 minutes.  Let cool completely before frosting

For the frosting:

3 cups confectioners sugar

2 sticks unsalted butter

1 tsp vanilla extract

3 generous dessert spoons of seedless raspberry jam

2-3 Tbs heavy cream

Pinch of salt

Using a mixer (standing or handheld) blend all the ingredients together.

Frost completely cooled cupcakes.