My Personal Cooking Challenge

One day, whilst perusing the internets and all the glorious splender that is on the webs I discovered Robicelli's.  To be exact, I was looking around Medium and found some great posts by Allison Robicelli, specifically her write up on jogging.  (Bob and I were joggers for a hot minute, now we are once again sloth-like.)  I discovered I liked all her Medium posts, and immediately started to day dream about us being BFF - I know, super creepy, and yes I promise this post is about food.  After doing my due diligence I discovered that my new girl crush BFF lived in NYC, and she and her husband make amazingly delicious cupcakes!  I also discovered that the Robicellis were writing a cupcake book!  I immediately jumped on Amazon and pre-ordered myself "Robielli's: A Love Story, With Cupcakes: With 50 Decidedly Grown-Up Recipes."

I waited an agonizingly long time to receive my book, and in the mean time I managed to make it out to NYC to actually try a Robicelli's cupcake.  It was worth it.  Delicious.   I had done my research and found a place called Cake Shop that carried the cupcakes and made sure it was the first stop on my list of places to visit. 

 

The Chocolate Cannoli: 

Chocolate cake, cannoli buttercream, cannoli shells, chocolate chips.

Hands down one of the best cupcakes I've ever had, and it made me so excited to receive my new cookbook.  And then finally, it arrived!

I opened the book and was happily surprised to find that it's written colloquially.  It's like Allison and Matt Robicelli are in my kitchen talking to me while baking.  Their tips and tricks, as well as "half assed corner" are delightful and easy to read.  It is hands down the most fun cookbook I own.  I read through the recipes and picked my first cupcake...The Pumpkin Spice Latte.  

 Mini Pumpkin Spice Latte cupcake with my awesome new book.

After my lovely cupcakes came out of the oven I took to the Twitter-verse and shared my first batch with the world, and @Robicellis.  I was quite pleased to discovered that @Robicellis is very active with their Twitter account and happily re-tweeted me.  It was then and there that I decided that I would bake every single recipe from the Robicelli cupcake book.  

So far I have baked:

Chocolate Peanut Butter Pretzel Cupcake - Chocolate coffee cupcake with Peanut Butter Buttercream Frosting, and Chocolate Ganache.

The Noah Cupcake - Apple Cupcake with Goat Cheese Buttercream Frosting, Bourbon Brown Butter Sauce and Candied Bacon.

 

The Betty White Cupcake - Brown Sugar Sour Cream Cupcake with Cheesecake Buttercream Frosting and Lingonberry Jam.

 

The Root Beer Float Cupcake - Chocolate Root Beer Cupcake with Vanilla Buttercream Frosting and a Root Beer Custard filling.

The Liddabit Cupcake - Chocolate Coffee Cupcake with Salted Caramel Marshmallow Buttercream Frosting, topped with Salted Caramel Sauce and Peanuts.

 

Each recipe is broken down into the different components of the cupcake.  At the end of the recipe is a section called "Assembly" which is super helpful because it helps to finish off your cupcake and make it look amazing.  I've also discovered that the recipes work great for making mini cupcakes, which is my preferred size of cupcake.  Each recipe makes two dozen regular cupcakes, and 48 mini cupcakes - just take 5 minutes off the bake time and you're good to go.  I've started making the cupcakes in batches of one full size dozen and two dozen mini cupcakes.

My personal cooking challenge to myself is to bake every single recipe in the book and tweet out the picture.  I've already baked six different flavors and can hardly wait to bake more!  Every few recipes I'll upload my pictures.

Keep your eyes peeled! 

 

Coffee Toffee Cheesecake - The Results!

 

Ta-da! My beautifully decorated cheesecake.

So, if you'll recall, I was making my first ever cheesecake just the other day.  Great news!  The coffee toffee cheesecake worked out awesomely!  It was far easier than I could have ever imagined.  If I can do it, you can do it.  I swear.  The above picture is my cheesecake after it had cooled over night.  I added the chopped up Heath Bars all over it and then melted dark chocolate and piped a nice design - cause that's how I roll. 

Now, here's how you too can make a delicious Coffee Toffee Cheesecake.  I used the linked recipe with a couple of small adjustments, which you can read about in my original cheesecake post.

I seriously followed the directions other than the previously read/written about small adjustments which I couldn't help, because I'm lazy.

One thing I will tell you, that I didn't know about until I was making a cheesecake is that you MUST wrap your spring form pan with tin foil.  (Yes, even if your spring form pan has a bottom.)  I laughed at the idea of wrapping tin foil around my pan, but did it anyway because I wasn't sure.  I'm really happy I did wrap the darn thing because when I removed the foil and pan it was all sticky/buttery gross and that would have ended up all over the place.  The tin foil just helps you contain the mess.  I used two sheets of foil and made sure to wrap all the way up around the sides of my pan.

I'll also say that when/if I make my crust again I will pulse the crap out of those cookies to make the crust easier to spread and mold to the bottom of the pan.

This is a picture of my cheesecake right after it had come out of the oven, still in it's water bath.  (Yes, you need to use the water bath.  Do it.)

 

After my cheesecake came out of the oven I delicately removed it from the water bath - so it'll stop cooking - and placed it on the counter to cool.  When it had cooled completely I covered the top with foil (cling wrap tends to fall in on the top and make it look ugly.) and put it in the fridge for the night.  Yup, just leave the foil and spring form pan as is, there's no reason to remove it yet.

The next morning I pulled the cheesecake out of the fridge and removed all the foil and the spring form pan.  It's messy, be prepared.  I used a new piece of foil on the bottom of my pan so I could move the cheesecake around without getting everything else in my kitchen gross.  I had my Heath Bars already chopped into a fine powder and sprinkled it all over.  The recipe calls for 4 Heath Bars but you will be fine with 3.  I melted my dark chocolate (when you melt chocolate in the microwave you should do it in 30sec increments so you don't burn your chocolate, ever 30sec take it out and stir it around), and put it in a small ziploc bag so I could pipe a nice design.  I stupidly didn't wait for my dark chocolate to cool sufficiently so I tried to burn my hands off.

Here's a nice side view of my decorated cheesecake.

 

And finally, cut that cheesecake up and eat it! Eat it like there's no tomorrow!