Microwave Coffee Nutella Cupcakes
The world does not need more cupcake recipes. There are millions of them — so many, in fact, that bloggers will soon be forced to resort to combinations like “wasabi cupcakes with peanut butter frosting,” “menudo tartelets with a caramelized tripe garnish,” and “carob-bean cakelets frosted with that white stuff herrings leave on the beach after a mass spawning.” These may sound disgusting, but good lighting, a $649 Nikon, and a few “Boost Color” filters on iPhoto will have you salivating over them readily enough. After all, they’re cupcakes, and our love for cupcakes will never die. The culinary cognoscenti have tried to steer our attention towards a series of lesser desserts — the macaron, the gourmet doughnut, the cake pop. But the public has refused to move on. Why?
Let me offer my hypothesis. Cupcakes are popular for the same reason that food blogs, Twilight, and Lady Gaga are popular: our obsession with cute but ill-considered pairings.* Such pairings occupy the adorable little nexus between tweeness and absurdity, practicing a sort of Dada that doesn’t deny its origin in infant babble — imagine Marcel Duchamp’s famous urinal signature written in Gelly Roll pen and enclosed in a heart. I shall call this aesthetic movement CupDada.
Supposedly, Dada’s refusal of coherence is a mode of critique — of capitalism, logic, or that old bourgeois standard, good taste. CupDada, however, does not engage in critique, because CupDada does not engage in anything: it filters, supersaturates, or dusts with powdered sugar. CupDada is why all food blogs in the world must have names that A) combine two seemingly unrelated objects or concepts that are, on closer inspection, still unrelated; B) evoke pretty pictures, preferably in the foreground of a Parisian market; and C) rhyme, alliterate, or consonate (but not assonate, because that would be vulgar). Think “Pies and Butterflies” or “Simple Folks with Artichokes” or “A Promenade of Tapenades,” but not “Eating Kale and Posting Bail,” “Big Mistakes with Cakes” or “Broccoli Raab and My Dead-End Job.”
And you know what? Maybe that’s ok. I love criticizing things, but not as much as I love cupcakes.
Here is my contribution to the massive CupDada movement. Because I can be only so twee without entirely losing my self-respect, its novelty will lie not in its combination of flavors, but rather in its mode of preparation. At the risk of being excommunicated from the food blogging world (with which I am not particularly communicated in the first place), I shall prepare these cupcakes in a microwave.
Microwaving cupcakes generally leads to three problems:
1) They cook unevenly.
2) They’re excessively dry.
3) Too much leavening remains unreacted, leading to a strong aftertaste.
This recipe thus makes three concessions to the limitations of the medium:
1) It makes small cupcakes. My guess for why this helps is that the small size ensures that more microwaves can penetrate the entire cake, reducing the difference in cooking time between the surface and the center.**
2) Small, steamed cupcakes. This sounds like blasphemy, but they do it all the time in Asia.
3) It uses eggs and a tiny bit of baking soda as leavening agents.
Microwave Coffee Nutella Cupcakes
- 2 eggs
- 2 tsp finely ground coffee beans
- 1 tsp vanilla
- 1 heaping tablespoon Nutella
- 1/2 cup sugar
- 1/2 cup flour
- 1/4 tsp baking soda
- extra Nutella for frosting
- extra coffee beans for garnish
- Find two microwave-safe dishes that can be stacked on top of one another. I used an 8 x 8 square dish on top of a 9 x 5 loaf pan. Fill the lower dish with one or two inches of water.
- Arrange paper cupcake liners on upper dish. NOTE: Do not use foil liners unless you have recently signed up for a massive fire insurance policy.
- Beat eggs until fluffy. Add wet ingredients and coffee grounds.
- Add dry ingredients and mix until just combined.
- Fill cupcake liners with one tablespoon of batter apiece. This will make your cupcakes relatively small but will help them bake more evenly.
- Place the two-dish contraption in the microwave. Microwave on high for two minutes, four cupcakes at a time. They won’t look done, but they’ll finish cooking on the counter.
- Let them rest for 10 minutes.
- Frost sparingly and garnish with coffee beans.
*Note that I resisted the obvious Bad Romance joke, as that would evince an embarrassing degree of familiarity (i.e., any) with Lady Gaga. The “cute but ill-considered” pairing in this case is between Lady Gaga and her career. Sorry, Gaga fans, but it’s true.
**The popular myth that microwaves cook from the inside out can be easily disproven by heating something briefly in a microwave and then observing the difference between the inside and outside. Disproving a myth, however, does not mean dispelling it; people have believed far stupider things with far more evidence to the contrary.
