Small Talk

doubly sweet

a few posts and a week ago, i did mention that i was going to do something for valentine's day. what else is a better gift than something homemade and even better, from my oven! the truth is, i haven't immersed myself that much into the gift-exchanging mood of valentine's day this much before and besides the fun, i'm actually doing it for two other reasons: to satisfy my baking crave and also to participate in meeta's february monthly mingle, sweet love. i've since decided that i will bake and give those close to my heart a duo of mini chocolate cupcakes. well yeah, chocolate for valentine's day sounds oh-so cliche and i did, at some point in time decide to lock it out of my baking space for this occasion. but... oh well, i fell off the wagon.

i had, in the beginning, made up my mind to not bake something chocolatey-brown just because i had self-diagnosed a chocolate-baked-goods overdose. it's not that i don't like chocolate. i love chocolate! dark chocolate in particular. it's just that i got a little sick of baking all that was the colour of brown; not any other brown, chocolatey-brown. then i remembered bea of la tartine gourmande had baked a white chocolate and matcha marbled cake not long ago. now that's interesting! it is still chocolate, just not brown! i was never a fan of white chocolate as it always tended to be too sweet for me. but the picture bea posted was just so tempting. the addition of matcha also attracted me. i've always liked matcha ice cream, so why not a matcha cake?

then... something else happened. my friends didn't want to let go of their craving for brown substances in my cupcakes. alright then. brown for the brown addicts and white for the white lovers!

for the love of white

won't you, for once, look at the dark side?

i baked the white chocolate and matcha cupcakes based on bea's recipe. this second attempt(yeah, you read that right) on the recipe was signifcantly better than the first attempt although not perfect. i blame myself for my lack of experience and under-trained hands. for the other half of my mini-cupcake duo, i replaced white chocolate with dark chocolate and matcha powder with steeped earl grey tea. the colour difference in the brown cupcake was not as great as the white cupcake so one adjustment i would make to the recipe the next time i bake them would be to add a little cocoa to the chocolate batter to make it darker for more contrast to the earl grey batter.

as the chinese saying goes: good things always come in pairs. so, why not mini cupcakes?