Monday Macaroons : douze.

yellow cupcakes with milk chocolate buttercream and marshmallow heart decorations..

Happy (Very, very) Belated Valentines Day! For me, Valentine's Day is a day to wear excessive amounts of pink and to indulge in all and any type of chocolates. Does it get any better than that? Usually I try and stay ahead of the game by making cards and treats for all of my friends a week before the actual date. However, things didn't exactly follow that pattern this year. I was supposed to be on an airplane all Valentine's Day heading to a ballet audition in South Carolina. Due to the ridiculous storms hitting pretty much the entire country though, my flights were cancelled and I had a free weekend at home. With this in mind, I decided to spend a night baking with one of my good friends. I decided on a classic; vanilla cupcakes and chocolate frosting.

To this day, I am still searching for that perfect cake recipe. Am I the only one who finds it near impossible to create a moist, yet dense, but also fluffy and delicious homemade cake? This one comes the closest to that as I have yet to achieve. The yellow cake turned out really well and was enhanced by the fantastic (if I do say so myself) milk chocolate buttercream.

For these cupcakes, I used one of my favorite cookbooks, "The Craft of Baking", by Karen DeMasco and Mindy Fox. I say this a lot, but this is a pretty straightforward recipe. Cream the butter, sugar and vanilla together…add eggs..so on, so on. What is a little different about this cake recipe is the use of cake flour. Cake flour is finer than the normal all purpose flour which most of us probably always have stocked in our kitchen cabinets. I do believe that the use of this specific flour results in a tastier, more moist cake.

You will have two separate mixtures, one with the flour, baking soda/powder, sour cream (yes! that is correct), and one with the whipped-to-stiff-peaks- egg mixture. You will gently fold the egg mixture into the flour mixture in order to create a light and airy batter.

Once you have the batter finished, you can pour it into a cake pan, or cupcake tins like I opted for. As my cupcakes were baking, I started the buttercream frosting process. I think that buttercream frosting can be kind of scary to make at first, but it really is worth it. It is rich and this one in particular is full of heavenly milk chocolate, which was the perfect thing for Valentine's Day.

The first step for the frosting is to melt the chocolate over a double broiler. This doesn't take too long and is pretty self-explanatory.

After that, you basically combine the eggs and sugar and focus your thoughts on keeping the eggs from cooking. That is the tricky part in making buttercream. You don't want the melted chocolate to cook the eggs, you have to be careful and temper is slowly. Once you have the eggs and chocolate combined, it's butter time. And I mean LOTS of butter. It is called buttercream for a reason!

Once you have both the cupcakes and the frosting ready to go, you are free to frost these miniature delicacies however you may please. I will show you a picture of how I did mine.

I did add a little homemade marshmallow heart on top of all the cupcakes. I thought it was a fun and festive way to decorate these little treats. I am posting the pictures of the marshmallow-making process, but I would love to dedicate an entire blog post in the future to marshmallows, so I will skip the step by step details for now.