vanilla cupcakes + sour cream chocolate ganache frosting

As said to me by my filipino gardener, "These cupcakes are good. Better than sex." For those imposter bloggers who throw around the term #foodporn willy nilly, don't listen to them anymore. This recipe is literally food porn. (it gave this man a foodgasm!)

In today's world, where the temptations of pretentious cronuts and yuza matcha pavlova ice cream sandwiches bombard us from twitter and instagram, sometimes it's nice to take a step back and reminisce about good ol' times. Those days when we happily nibbled on vanilla cupcakes and overly sweet chocolate frosting, not because they were even that good, but because that's all we knew. The only difference is this time it's going to taste good. I mean so good, you're going to find yourself having to make another batch cause you somehow ate a dozen cupcakes in the span of writing a short paragraph. 

peanut butter cupcakes - nutty personal only

Every morning for the past month I've been eating Peanut Butter Sandwiches. Two toasted slices, spreaded with two tablespoons of peanut butter on the toasted side while it's still warm and folded in half. The bread is soft, but crispy on the inside filled with gooey, peanut buttery goodness, it's been the highlight of my day for, like I've said, the past month which is - pretty sad. But because I enjoy my preday peanut butter sandwiches so much, I decided to make a peanut butter dessert that paid a very special homage to that. 

These "Double" Peanut Butter Cupcakes are moist and dense on the inside but light, crispy and golden on top. Which aesthetically doesn't matter because we're just going to cover it with a delicious Peanut Butter Frosting. However texture wise it almost exactly replicates what I love so much about my morning Peanut Butter Sandwiches. 

strawberry mousse chiffon cake - brought to you from the mystical lands of atlanta!

Chiffon sounds interesting right? I bet it was the only reason why clicked this link. Well sorry to disappoint you but, a chiffon cake is nothing but a sponge cake in French. Disappointing right…wait, I bet you don’t even know how to make a sponge cake. Hypocritess ;) This cake is light and fluffy, layered with my Five-Second Strawberry Mousse, and covered with whipped cream. For the holidays I flew to Atlanta to see how the great bakers there bake their cakes, and to also share this delicious chow-fection to the entire world (otherwise known as the 5 people who have visted this blog and my immediate family). The recipe demonstrated in this blogpost is none other than of famous Chinese chef, Victor Hsu, also known as my uncle, and also referred to as “who is that guy?” Well you would be right, he is a nobody, but there’s one thing he is known for, Chiffon Cakes. After smuggling from Taiwan the secrets to making perfectly light, fluffy chiffon, he perfected it with his own mad scientific flair. Littered below are his many pro tips on how to make a perfect chiffon cake that will surely impress your relatives and friends this holiday season. So without two twists of a peacock’s feathers let’s get bakin’ so we can get cakin’.

Uncle Vic begins his recipe by weighing out his dry and wet ingredients. For me I don't have a digital scale, or any scale for that matter, so in the recipe below I converted all the measurements to volume, however a part of me agrees that weight measurements would be more precise. Once your mise en place is complete we can begin to mix the meringue for the cake. The thing with a chiffon cake is that it doesn't have baking soda nor baking powder in the batter. For a cake to rise you need one of the two components, a mechanical leavener, or a chemical leavener. Usually in cakes and cookies we add baking soda or powder, these are called chemical leaveners. When they are baked they cause a chemical reaction in the batter that rises the cake. In things like puff pastry, or chiffon cake there are certain components in the dessert that cause it to rise. In puff pastry it is because of all the layers of fat and flour that expand when they're stack on top of each other. In chiffon cakes the air pockets in the meringue expand with steam causing the cake to rise. These are called mechanical leaveners.