Chocolate butter cupcakes with chocolate whipped cream

For Noah's birthday today, we made chocolate cupcakes. We used Rose Levy Beranbaum's chocolate butter cupcake recipe from her Heavenly Cakes book. (It's an amazing book. All of her books are worth buying and reading and baking from.) I won't post it here -- just buy the book. :)

One of the rewarding things about Rose's cake recipes is that they come out perfectly flat on top, which makes it easy to apply frosting.

The texture is lighter and softer than a typical chocolate cake, partly due to the use of cake flour and superfine sugar, rather than all-purpose flour and granulated sugar, and partly due to her special mixing technique, which involves mixing softened butter into the dry ingredients, prior to adding the liquids.

For frosting, Noah wanted something chocolaty but light, so we used my version of chocolate whipped cream. It goes like this:

Chocolate whipped cream

-- adapted from this recipe

Ingredients

• 3 T cocoa powder (I prefer Guittard Cocoa Rouge)
• 3 T sugar
• 1 C cream
• 1/2 tsp vanilla

Tools

• Electric hand mixer

Directions

• Measure the cocoa powder and sugar into a metal bowl. Put the bowl and the beaters from the mixer into the freezer, to chill.
• Add 3 T of the cream, and the vanilla, to the dry ingredients. Mix to form a paste.
• Add the rest of the cream in a couple of batches, mixing to uniformity after each addition.
• Whip until there are stiff peaks.
• Yield: 4 servings

Happy birthday!