Paperwhite Creations: Boston Cream Cupcakes

The flavour of the day today is Boston Cream by Baskin Robbins. This would be a very interesting flavour of ice cream to try out one day. However, we are making Boston Cream cupcakes today. It’s a slightly different take on the Boston Cream Pie and it’s absolutely delicious.

We’ve made these cupcakes a couple of times before. They do take some time so they are a treat to have for sure.

You will need:

Pastry Cream

1 ½ cups of heavy cream

3 large egg yolks

1/3 cup of sugar

4 tsp. of cornstarch

2 tbsp. of butter

1 ½ tsp. of vanilla

Cupcakes

1 ¾ cups of flour

1 cup of sugar

1 ½ tsp. of baking powder

¾ tsp. of salt

12 tbsp. of butter softened

3 large eggs

¾ cup of whole milk

1 ½ tsp. of vanilla extract

Glaze

1 cup of semisweet chocolate

2/3 cup of heavy cream

¼ cup of light corn syrup

½ tsp. of vanilla

Make the pastry cream first so that it can set and cool down in the fridge. Start off by bringing the cream to a simmer over medium heat. Meanwhile, whisk the yolks, sugar, and the salt in a large bowl until well mixed and then whisk in the cornstarch until pale yellow and thick.

Add the hot cream slowly into the yolk mixture and return immediately to the pan and cook at medium heat until glossy and thickened, about 1 minute. Whisk in the butter and the vanilla and then sir and transfer to a bowl. Press plastic wrap on the surface of the cream mix and chill for about 2 hours.

Now it’s time to make the cakes!

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Line your muffin tins with liners; we ended up using two muffin tins because we probably didn’t fill up the cups as much as we should.

Whisk the dry ingredients together (flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt) in your mixer’s bowl. Use your mixer to beat the cut up butter into the flour mix. Chop it into 12 pieces and add in 30 second intervals. Beat until it looks like moist crumbs.

Beat in the eggs one at a time. Then beat in the milk and vanilla and increase the speed to medium and beat the batter until light and fluffy.

Now fill up your muffin cups about three quarters full; you don’t want it to be too full looking though. They aren’t meant to be tall fluffy cupcakes.

Bake for 18 to 20 minutes until the center comes out clean when a toothpick is inserted. Cool the cupcakes in the tin for 10 minutes before putting them all on a rack to cool even more.

It’s all about timing for these last few steps. When the cupcakes feel all cooled down, then make your glaze because it needs about 20 minutes to “set” and that will give you time to carve your cupcakes.

For the glaze, microwave the chocolate, cream, corn syrup, and vanilla all together in a heatproof bowl. Stir every 30 seconds for 1-2 minutes until all of the ingredients are melted and smooth. Let it thicken for about 20 minutes.

While the glaze is thickening, you can carve your cupcakes. Basically you want to make a hollow in the center of you cupcake for the cream to go into so cut around the inside edge of the top of your cupcake. Cut downward and at an angle towards the center but make sure you don’t go too deep that you cut through the bottom. You should remove an upside down cone if you did it right.

Cut the pointed end of the cone off so that you have a flat “lid” left. Put the extra cake bits aside for nibbling on later.

Take the pastry cream out of the fridge and fill all of the hollowed out cupcakes and then put their lids back on.

This is the point where you ca decide if you want to take all of the cupcakes liners off of the cupcakes or not. We left them on, but realized that after we put the glaze on, it was really messy because glaze was all over the liners and it was hard to take them off.

Ok, so once you have the cupcakes the way you want them and all filled, pour that glaze over the tops of all of them so that it dribbles down the sides and completely covers the top. You will probably have glaze leftover, but not to worry, it’s good to put on ice cream so it won’t go to waste. Something to remember to save yourself from a big huge mess, keep the cupcakes on the wire rack and line a cookie sheet with parchment so that it catches all of the excess glaze.