Red Pepper Cupcakes with White Chocolate Icing

Completed cupcake

It's been a while since I've had a new food-related project. A recipe that involves lots of steps, some obscure ingredients and appliances like the juice extractor and dehydrator. I don't think I've even used my juice extractor since I moved to Chicago last summer. It was time.

I recently picked up Amanda Cohen et al.'s Dirt Candy, a unique cookbook from their restaurant. It's unique in a couple respects. First, it's my only cookbook in comic book form. It tells the story of their restaurant and provides recipes in an entertaining, quirky, graphic style that's a lot of fun. Second, it's a vegetarian cookbook that uses lots of fresh ingredients and flavors, while also using innovative techniques from the molecular gastronomy movement. It provides recipes for things that look like food, but prepared creatively and in interesting ways. It's a way to cook interesting food that doesn't feel like it came from a chemistry lab.

Making red pepper jam.

These cupcakes are my first project from this book, and "project" is the apt term. I didn't follow the recipe perfectly, but I came close. My only points of deviation were making cupcakes instead of a layer cake, and not serving them with ice cream and other recommended accompaniments.

The idea for these apparently comes from traditional red velvet cake, but the resemblance stops with the color. For starters, they're not even that red. Second, they're flavored and colored with, well, red bell peppers. And third, they have a white chocolate icing.

Grinding dehydrated pulp into powder

How do you color and flavor a cake with red bell peppers? It's a fair question, and there are several steps involved because the red peppers are transformed into many different creations. It starts with the purchase of a couple pounds of red peppers. About half of these get turned into a homemade red pepper jam (diced peppers cooked in pepper juice with some sugar, then pureed). The rest get turned into red pepper juice, which is reduced substantially to thicken it. And the pulp from the juice extractor is dehydrated and ground into a powder. All pretty clever, right?

So then you prepare a fairly typical cake batter, but the with red pepper powder mixed in with the butter and sugar, and some thickened red pepper juice mixed in with the wet ingredients (buttermilk in this case).

The icing is then made from melted white chocolate that gets beaten into a butter/cream cheese blend along with some confectioner's sugar. I added some lime extract for good measure.

To finish the cupcakes, I spread some red pepper jam on the top of each cupcake (instead of between the layers, as recommended in the book), and icing on top of that. The outcome? Tasty. Definite taste of red pepper. Moist cake. Creamy icing. Not the best thing ever and I might not make them again given the effort. But unique and well worth a try!  I'll foist them on some