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We've followed the adventures of Stefani Pollack at her hugely popular Cupcake Project blog for some time. She bakes a different avant garde cupcake every week, and reading about creations like “Cupcakes Benedict” (maple cupcakes topped with black forest bacon, poached eggs, and maple hollandaise sauce) or her Easter cupcakes baked inside eggshells is a good time. Her “Cupcakewurst” cupcakes baked within sausage skins were a jaw-dropper (especially when they exploded on the grill).
Pollack is celebrating the completion of a baking project that played out like a long, frustrating scientific study, and finally ended this past Tuesday with a triumph, she says, that may define her exploits for years to come.
The “Ultimate Chocolate Cupcake” is a recipe developed by Pollack in coordination with more than 50 other home bakers. The blogger experimented until she came up with what she felt was an exemplary recipe for a chocolate cupcake, and then asked for help from her “Cupcake Explorers.”
Pollack is something of a cult leader. Her Cupcake Explorers are a sizable group of minions who wait by her back door to lick her rubber spatulas. Just kidding (we think). But when Pollack announced her quest for the UCC (Ultimate Chocolate Cupcake), about 500 novice and pro cooks “applied” for 50 available spots as uncompensated test bakers. That's an enviable return on a crowdsourcing endeavor.
The Explorers are not “yes-men.” Indeed, they are more like “no-women.” They baked chocolate cupcakes according to Pollack's instructions, filled out questionnaires with their opinions on "appearance, moisture, density, taste, and crumbliness," explained Pollack, and then unmercifully directed their blogger of fealty back to the ol' drawing board.
As Pollack notes on her blog, “The Explorers wanted the Ultimate Chocolate Cupcake to be light and fluffy (not brownie-like) with an intense chocolate flavor. It was a hard balance to find. As I made the cupcakes lighter, they tended to become less chocolatey; packing in cocoa powder made the cupcakes too heavy. It took almost a year of experimentation to nail down the perfect combination of ingredients.”
Acting on the questionnaire responses, Pollack spent more than a year making 69 batches of cupcakes and parsing through seven waves of crowdsourced feedback. It was a herculean undertaking of uncertain advances, frustration, and (insert sad, scrapey violin noises) a whole lotta chocolate.
To put this in perspective, Pollack was proud of her first UCC recipe, developed about a year ago. But when she shared it with the 50 Explorers, only 25% agreed it was the best chocolate cupcake in the known realms. A year and seven rounds of feedback later, Pollack got that percentage up to 63% and realized that this was a number that actually denoted success.
“If I can get more than one out of two people to say this is the best chocolate cupcake they’ve ever eaten, I'm happy,” she said. (And these aren't ordinary eaters, we'd add. Many of the testers are avid bakers, and most if not all of them are dessert-blog junkies.)
The result, she wrote at her blog, is “moist and light with an unmistakable chocolate flavor.”
“Sweetness is perfect,” wrote one of the Explorers. “Cake is not dry. Cake practically melts in my mouth. It’s impossible to take [just] one bite of cake.”
So what's in the recipe that makes it all that and a bag of (chocolate) chips?
“It's really different than any chocolate-cupcake recipe I've ever seen,” Pollack averred. “There’s not too many out there that use both cocoa powder and a melted chocolate bar or chips. It also uses both oil and butter, which is unusual. And it uses two eggs plus two egg yolks.”
Another feature of the recipe is that it includes a number of choices for the baker to make – milk or dark chocolate, what brand of chocolate and cocoa powder, and, curiously, whether to add coffee to the mix.
“A million people have told me that adding coffee to chocolate brings out the chocolate flavor, and that you can't taste the coffee in the cake in the end,” said Pollack. “I've never used it before, though, because but I can always taste it. Finally, for the last round of testing, I made it optional.”
Of the 63% of testers that went gaga for the final version of the recipe, 62% of those preferred coffee in the mix.
And now, the moment you've all been waiting for -- what about the frosting?
The cupcake (at right) is supposedly so moist and awesome, it doesn't need frosting. But that's like saying lox doesn't need cream cheese.
Pollack recommends her favorite homemade frosting, a chocolate cream-cheese frosting, to go with the UCC.
Pollack noted her milestone by having the choco-geniuses at Kakao Chocolate make a special ornamental pedestal and crown (above) for the UCC.
The UCC joins the UVC, the “Ultimate Vanilla Cupcake” (left), that Pollack developed using the same crowdsourcing methods two years ago. The latter recipe, she said, is a page so popular that people post comments under it daily to this day. Several retail bakeries also use the recipe, she said.
If you love food blogs and you'd like to get to know Pollack, consider the St. Louis Food Media Forum at the Culinary Institute of St. Louis, from August 9 to 11. Topics covered include blogging, freelance writing, cookbook authorship, staff writing positions, and food photography and video. The guests of honor are the cute couple behind the popular cooking blog Ideas in Food. Pollack and a group of friends created the conference last year.
In the meantime, we'll content ourselves with some of the Cupcake Project's "greatest hits," like Pickle-and-Ice-Cream Pregnancy Cupcakes, as featured in People; Gefilte Fish Cupcakes with Horseradish Whipped Cream (below left), as featured at Today.com; Chocolate Chip Cookie Grilled Cheese Sandwiches (below right), as featured on "The Chew"; and Leftover Holiday Eggnog and Bread Pudding Cupcakes as featured at PaulaDeen.com, where Pollack pens a recipe column.
Cupcake photos courtesy of Stefani's husband, Jonathan Pollack, of J. Pollack Photography.
