This all started when I was texting Zobe, remarking on how lovely the day was, and that I needed food, so we should combine these facts into the act of going on a walk to the grocery
store. She then sent me the link to a website that changed the course of the entire day. It had the recipe for these delightful Butterbeer Cupcakes (I will try to figure out how to post it here...). She found it on Pinterest. So, after a brief stint with Zumba (no more details on that one), Zobe and I went to the grocery store, where we bought what we would need for these cupcakes. On the way, we found a lovely little outlet in the middle of
the grass (pictured here). We never did discover why it was there, but my personal guess is that it was placed so that people could charge their cellphones while they waited for the crosswalk light to change. How considerate!
Anyway, so we went to the store and picked up the ingredients we needed. PS, what the heck is "butter flavoring"? It sounds evil. Zobe and I just avoided that. And the cupcakes turned out just fine without it, so there. :P We then walked home and tried to make this stuff. First we made the cupcake part, as we were supposed to, and this went very well. I felt very sophisticated when we were making the ganache, because we used that technique where you boil water in one pot and then stick another pot on top of that with whatever you're cooking (in our case, a bag of butterscotch chips and a cup of heavy cream.Suuuuuuuuuper healthy!). Whatever that
technique is. Zobe is pictured here demonstrating how it's done. Kudos to Mom for teaching me that one!
The cupcakes were probably done by about the time we finished the ganache, but they still needed to cool. We
busied ourselves making the icing, which didn't take very long, and then it was our job to wait for the cupcakes to cool enough for us to take them out of the pan. Here's the thing: I'm not exactly patient. Especially when it comes to baking. Not patient at all. Once the icing was done, I maybe waited a few minutes before the excavation project began. It started with a spoon, which I soon switched out for a butter knife, because I realized that, though spoons have the ability to also pry out under the cupcake, they are not shaped perfectly to accomplish this task without accidentally tearing or cutting the cupcake in the process. From here on out, I carefully cut around each cupcake with a knife, then tried twisting it out, then realized it was still stuck, and cut around it again, and then became even more impatient and just pulled the dang cupcake out. This was, for the most part, a successful technique. Eventually, though, the number of raggedy-bottomed cupcakes increased to the point that Zobe, in an interesting role reversal, scolded me in a motherly manner and told me that I needed to just wait for them to cool off. In my defense, we still had some more cupcake batter left and only the one cupcake pan, so I was really just trying to get those last few cupcakes baked. So I shoved the pan in the fridge and paced around, moody and impatient, until I couldn't take it any more and I pulled it out and harvested those last few cupcakes.
Once all of the cupcakes were out of the pan, the next step was inserting the ganache into the cupcakes. This was a particularly tricky step, as it required a squeeze-bottle, like the kind that are painted cheesy and obnoxious shades of yellow and red and you stick mustard and ketchup in them, and we didn't have one, nor could we find one in our quick trip to
Smith's. We managed to get this step done with a butter knife and a plastic bag with one of the corners cut off.
First, a butter knife was inserted into the center of the cupcake, down... maybe an inch and a half? It could have reached the bottom for all I know, though I tried not to let it go down that low, for fear that the ganache would leak out (especially since the bottoms of many of these cupcakes were no longer intact). That did not happen, though, thankfully. What we did next was a long, tedious, and well-worth it process. Believe it or not, it is not easy to aim with a plastic bag pretty full of melted butterscotch and cream.
It was a very delicate and precise project. 
You have to hold the bag just right, so you have control over the tip of
the bag, but you also have control over letting the large quantities of free-spirited ganache out of the bag. When (not "if") we do this again, I will probably put less ganache in the bag. The tip of the bag was then inserted into (or positioned around) the knife-slit in the cupcake, and then, very slowly, I squeezed the bag, so ganache came out, just until it came flowing out of the top of the cupcake. Stopping the ganache flow was a little tricky and involved lots of wiping up (and licking fingers! I swear, I must have eaten as much of the ganache during this part as actually went into the cupcakes). The ganache eventually sank into the cupcakes, and the process was repeated. I must have done this 6 or 7 times for each cupcake. This part became easier, however, when Zobe came by and squeezed the cupcakes, widening the cut in the middle, while I squeezed the ganache in. These cupcakes I only filled them 2 or 3 times each. While this part of the process was rather tedious, it was SO worth the result. I'm telling you, these things are fantastic!
So, by this point, Zobe and I were getting a little hopped up on sugar. It was time, however, to frost our cupcakes. And this was pretty good frosting, too. Frosting cupcakes isn't too interesting and thus doesn't deserve too much note, except for the fact that we realized half way through icing that there was a TON of this stuff, and there was no way that we were going to finish off all of it. Zobe voiced her regrets that she had been going a little stingy on the icing before, because she hadn't thought there was going to be enough. It was around this point that the sugar-crazy broke through, evidenced by the exclamation "Frost ALL THE THINGS!" referencing that meme... base? Picture? Thing? This outburst by someone, we've long forgotten who, started an evening full of phrases in this structure, such as "Eat ALL the Ganache!" and other similar things. I present the picture below as evidence of our insanity.
Once they were iced, we realized that not only did we have more than half of the icing left, but we also had more than half of the ganache left in the bag, and there was still more in the pot. We saw on the blog that the recipe came from that the creator had garnished the tops of the cupcakes with more ganache, so we decided we would follow in suit. I went for a kind of drizzled look, giving each cupcake my special attention. My first turned out almost perfectly, which is why I kept attempting to do this. After this, though, the second one was too dotty, the third too line-y, and none of the others were quite right either. Well, I only did half. Zobe asked to do the second half, and she arranged all of hers closely on the plate, then took the ganache bag, and drenched them all in thick lines of butterscotch-y goodness. Well, that's one way to get it done. Posting the results below.
We then distributed the cupcakes. We have a sort of dessert-exchange going on with an apartment of guys across the
street from us, and so we loaded four cupcakes on a plate and took them over there. We saw these guys the next day at church, and they came up to us and thanked us for the cupcakes, somewhat zombified, as though their muggle minds were still under the powerful, magical influence of the butterbeer
awesomeness (Win!). On the way back from this apartment, we passed these two other guys that we know, and we told them that we were delivering cupcakes. We invited them over to have one, and they came soon after. We then invited our friend Danny over, because we know how he loves food. :) He ate three! Other than that, Brie had one, Amber had one, and Zobe and I shared one (we had had WAY too much sugar at this point). Everyone LOVED them! Unfortunately, we miscounted, so when Dan came over and we told him that we had saved him one, it turns out that we kind of didn't have one for him, so Elisabeth only ended up
getting a small part of one, and Sierra ended up getting none at all. This would be more tragic, were we not looking for an excuse to do this again sometime soon. There's a Relief Society
activity coming up, and we signed up to bring desserts... :)
***Here's the link to the recipe: http://amybites.com/?p=623 . I decided to actually read the post recently, and I realized
that our cupcakes probably tasted pretty different from the real ones, because she says that the butter flavoring is important (I'm still weirded out by it), and that you should use dark brown sugar rather than light brown, because it gives it more of a molasses-y flavor. Well, our way worked too.
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