Birthday Cupcakes and Truffles

June 9, 2013

June 8th was the birthday of someone who is very important to me. I wanted to give her something special, but had no chance to make anything intricate. So I settled for cupcakes. The recipe for the cake is this basic vegan cake recipe (it's almost my go-to recipe for cakes nowadays), except without the matcha. I made some large cupcakes as well as some mini ones.

The frosting is the same as well, except that I tried to give it a slight strawberry flavor by mixing in some strawberry jam. The difference in moisture content (as well as a lack of time resulting in insufficient cooling of the mixture) led to it having a weird, almost unmixed aspect >.<

Some of the mini cupcakes fell apart when I tried to take them out of the silicone mold, so I thought I would try to make some impromptu cake truffles that I've read about on so many blogs. I put the broken cupcakes in a blender to turn it into cake crumbs, and mixed in leftover frosting to make it stick together. I formed little balls, stuck toothpicks in them, then dipped them in melted chocolate.

I had a few issues with the cake balls not staying on the toothpick while dipping in the chocolate. After looking it up, it would seem that it's best to refrigerate the uncoated truffles before dipping them. It will be worth trying another time (with maybe less sugar in the cake/frosting mix).

For the end result, I packed a couple of large cupcakes with a few of the mini ones, and a bunch of truffles, into an aluminum pan (kind of like those that pre-cooked lasagna comes in at the store, because that's all I had), decorated it all, and gave it as a present, with a card.