Cupcakes

Last night, I made cupcakes. I was inspired by the idea of s'mores, so I made chocolate cupcakes with a marshmallow topping.

The chocolate cupcakes came from The Cake Bible's chocolate bread recipe. They were good, but I think I would have preferred a more fudgy consistency. Like Alton Brown's chocolate lava muffins.

I've made homemade marshmallows before, but I couldn't find my recipe so I decided to fake it. You basically take whipped egg whites and stream in a hot sugar syrup -- all while the mixer is going. It's not too hard. Normal recipes also include gelatin, but since I'm vegetarian, I leave it out. You can't get a normal marshmallow texture that way, but you can get a marshmallow fluff.

But I was worried that I wouldn't have enough and I used more egg white than I really needed. So I got a lot of fluff and the texture ended up being a lot less marshmallow and a lot more île from îles flottantes. You can tell from the top picture -- the topping is sort of floating on the cupcakes. Still pretty tasty, though. And they looked neat.