Heavenly cake - Mud Turtle Cup Cakes

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These cupcakes were delicious. The complex flavors played together nicely on the palette. Despite their flavor, the cupcakes were slightly on the dry and crumbly side. This caused them to labor under the weight of the the chocolate and the caramel and did not have a smooth entrance into the mouth. The cake and condiment could not be eaten properly together without it falling apart.

Cup Cake Batter. The sour cream really added something. Perhaps I should have added a tap more for extra moisture. Perhaps all purpose flour would have been better than cake flour in lending the necessary strength to the cupcakes. 

Shayna, as always, was very eager to help.

The cup-cakes.    

Ganache.

Caramel. It got a little hard, by mostly it was nice and chewy.

For the life of me, I could not see wasting that extra good caramel and just putting a circle in the center. Besides, the cup-cakes turned out humped.

I also took my first foray into the wonderful world of Maggie Glezer's formulas, starting with the Acme bakery style baguette.

She eschewes Peter Reinhart's idea in "The Bread Baker's Apprentice" of opening the oven door several times to spray water. Instead she either recommends a pressurized hose or  spraying the loaves themselves with water right before putting them in. Since I am so used to spraying the walls, I actually sprayed the walls when I just put them in but then did not open the oven until it was time to turn them. I'll admit to over baking these a bit. However the crust was still terrifically crisp and her method seems to work nicely.

This recipe uses a poolish and a preferment and has a wonderful flavor, better, I thought, than the BBA pan a l'aciene. Her mixing method also produced this wonderful open crumb. I'm sold! :)