Mela's Baking Adventures: Food for the (Stressed) Brain

Oh Spring, you're my favorite movement of Vivaldi's Four Seasons. Spring the season, however, not so much, mostly because Spring means MCAT time for us Pre-Med students. So, here's to my Chemistry tutor, Miss Megan, who is taking her MCAT this weekend.

I decided on Brain Cupcakes (thank you, Ms. Humble for the idea!),

and for the Devil's food cupcake recipe, I turned to Martha Stewart.

Yum, yum, butter, buttermilk and chocolate... exactly what a stressed out brain needs.

My least favorite step: Chopping the chocolate. I hate chopping chocolate because it melts so easily in my hands when I'm holding it steady. I probably should have chopped the pieces smaller, but again, I hate this part so I tried to finish it as soon as I could.

Melting the chocolate

Mixing the melted chocolate with the batter

At first, everything looked fine. It seemed like Devil's food, but only until the chocolate was thoroughly mixed.

See, what happened was, I was in a rush to get home and bought the wrong type of chocolate- bittersweet instead of unsweetened. To try and fix things, I added a bit of unsweetened baking cocoa.

But that was useless. I still ended up with just plain chocolate cupcakes. Plain chocolate cupcakes with flat tops. Not good because the flat tops made it challenging to pipe the icing into nice brains. I really need to figure out how to make domed cupcakes. If you know how, please, please, please tell me.

Making the Swiss Meringue buttercream icing required this many sticks of butter... along with five egg whites. Yikes.

And the final product... flat brains atop flat cupcakes!

(Yes, there is ganache filling, but that also required chopping chocolate into fine bits and I was too frustrated to take pictures of the process. Sorry for depriving you)

More brain cupcakes