Mimosa Cupcakes for the New Year!
Welcome to 2010! Like many of you, we celebrated the New Year with a bottle of champagne. Since this year we had a quiet private celebration, we were left over with most of a bottle. What do we do with a leftover bottle of champagne the morning after New Years Eve? Make mimosas and celebrate some more!
The two ingredients in a mimosa are orange juice and champagne. While there are disagreements on the amount of orange juice versus the amount of champagne, the official International Bartender’s Association recipe calls simply for equal parts orange juice and champagne, and who wants to argue when there’s cupcakes around? We’d much rather go with what the International Bartenders say and try for a cupcake that celebrated both flavors equally!
From previous undocumented cupcake expirements, we have learned that light flavors like champagne usually get lost in the process of baking cake batter. How to fix this? We took inspiration from the mimosa itself. You start with the orange juice, and then add the champagne.
We started with a orange-flavored standard ‘yellow’ cake, exchanging orange juice for the water in the regular recipe, and replacing half of the vanilla extract with orange extract. Because of the fruit sugars in orange juice (Fresh squeezed! No HFCS for us! It’s bad for you and it tastes funny!) we had to then tweak the amount of flour and sugar and leavening agents (baking soda, baking powder, buttermilk) to account for the increased sugar in the juice, and then adjusting the baking time slightly, because increased sugar means the cake will brown faster.
As you can see, they turned out a very pretty shade of golden yellow. Isn’t that pretty?.
To add the champagne flavor, we made a flavored simple syrup. Which is, not at all coincidentally, a regular cocktail ingredient of it’s own! Normally this is two parts sugar to one part water. In our case, we used one part granulated sugar, one part Karo syrup and one part champagne. Mostly because it speeds up the process of making the syrup, because as you can see from the paragraph below, we were a little impatient to get to the cupcake eating.
Getting the syrup into the cupcakes… well, that part was a little messy, and a lot of fun. Basically, we took our oh-so-handy cupcake poking tool (You might call it a chopstick, we call it a cupcake poking tool. Okay, we call it a chopstick when we’re eating stir-fry with it, but when we’re poking cupcakes, it’s a cupcake poking tool.) and poked 5-6 holes in each cupcake and spooned the syrup over them.
Yep. Just a little messy.
We cover our worktable with butcher paper to make cleanup faster, and it’s a good thing too because maaaaaaaybe we drank some mimosas while we made that syrup. It turns out watched pots don’t boil any faster if you watch them with a glass in your hand.
We’ve been calling the frosting a champagne cream frosting, but really it’s champagne very slightly orange marshmallow buttercream. Which is really long to type out and to say and really that’s just excessive. Who needs all those words when you’re enjoying delicious cupcakes.
The marshmallow allows for a much lighter and fluffier frosting that a standard buttercream, and for a cupcake like this, a heavy frosting would overwhelm the cake and syrup. It’s flavored with a touch of orange extract and the remaining champagne syrup.
We wanted that delicate bubbly look for the frosting and after playing with several frosting tips we ended up with this effect. to recreate it exactly, you would use the Wilton Tip #136 but any frosting tip that has multiple small openings that create a lacy fluffy effect would work.
The Cupcake Test Team (IE: Our friends, family and co-workers) declared them delicious and a great way to start 2010!
Those look so very, very delicious. I usually loathe champagne, but you’ve actually managed to make it look sweet and yummy…
Please let me know if and when you ever get around to doing cross-country shipping because I would pay money for a dozen or so.
Oh~ And I forgot to say that my family loved the Christmas cupcakes. As predicted, the minis went first, and they were very impressed by how good they looked and tasted. Thanks again!