This past weekend, I tried to replicate Blondie and Brownie's Root Beer Floatie Cupcakes. It called for a cake mix, instead of a recipe from scratch, but the cake did come out moist without crumbing. (Even though it tasted... boxy.) The frosting was sweet and light cream cheese -- just enough to hold the tiny scoops of ice cream in place.

My only complaint is that for "root beer" cupcakes, (two cups of it in the batter), there was barely any root beer taste. I boiled up some extra soda into a syrup to drizzle over the top to give a little more flavor. Maybe root beer extract in the batter would end up with a better result.

I skipped the brown food coloring, but they're still cute as anything with their little ice cream scoops and straw.

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This cupcake is a combination of chocolate cupcake with cream filling and peanut butter frosting. The cake is Double Dark Chocolate from Food & Wine Magazine, the center is piped with a cream filling recipe from Allrecipes.com, and the topping is Peanut Butter Frosting comes from the January 2003 issue of Bon Appétit.

The cake was moist, but not as flavorful and dense as the last chocolate recipe. Once the filling went in, they tended to fall apart. Still tasty, but only edible with a spoon. The filling was more buttercream than I'd have liked, but it was a last-minute addition that I wasn't totally prepared for. I meant to make chocolate cake with peanut butter frosting and filling, but after sampling the frosting, it seemed too thick and peanut-buttery to have it inside and outside. I searched for a lighter, fluffier filling that I could quickly make from the pantry. Next time I might try some variation on whipped cream.

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The cupcake of the week is Lemon Cataclysm. They started out as Lemon Burst, but there's only lemon filling in those (and I'm not too big on the box mixes either). Then I found Cupcake Bakeshop's Lemon Curd Filled Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Frosting. Again, the only lemon is in the filling... and I wasn't looking for a cream cheese frosting either.

To get the mouth-puckering effect I wanted, I combined the Magnolia Bakery Cookbook's basic yellow cupcake recipe with "luscious lemon frosting," which, to be accurate, is more of a glaze than a frosting. If you pipe anything onto the cupcake, be aware that it will spread out into the barest suggestion of your shape within a few minutes. After I discovered this, I started making abstract swirls instead of precise stars. These are lemony enough to curl your hair. They're more than a burst, just past an explosion... they're a Lemon Cataclysm.

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I've been on a cupcake kick after finding the Cupcakes Take the Cake blog. And by "being on a kick," I mean reading every post back to the beginning of the site and showing Dave more adorable cupcake photos than he can stand.

Finally, I took action. I whipped up a batch of Martha Stewart's Easy Chocolate Cupcakes, then a bowl of Meringue Butter Cream and made twelve little cakes of my own.

First, a note about these two recipes. The cupcakes came out dense, moist and almost like a lighter version of a brownie. It's the sour cream that keeps them from becoming dry and when added to cocoa powder, gives the cakes their chocolately sharpness. And the buttercream... when people ask my favorite cake topping, (a question that comes up more often than you'd think), my stock answer is cream cheese frosting. It's a fairly well-known standby that says you like a little sweetness, but you're not a high-maintenance person. But really, deep down, I'm the kind of girl who likes a fluffy not-so-sweet buttercream that takes 192 steps to make and involves temperature regulation down to a degree, double-boilers, and something called a chinoise. The kind of frosting you only get on a slice of wedding cake once a year.

Ah, but this Meringue Butter Cream recipe was just such a thing... sans chinoise. It did have a handful of fussy little steps, but the result was well worth the effort of trying to whisk a bowl of temperamental egg whites over a simmering pot of water while holding the instant-read thermometer in my teeth. I've heard that other buttercreams use corn syrup, which is not a favorite ingredient of mine. This one had just granulated sugar. Here is the finished buttercream in it's pristine white state. It's so good it will make a grown man cry.

And the finished cupcakes themselves. I colored the buttercream with a little Wilton paste that I found in the spice cabinet that had to be at least three years old. They were from whenever it was that Trevor had a planet-themed birthday party, and a little grainy. Time for a few new jars. I intended to make the cakes rose and cocoa, but I ended up with mauve and latte. Close enough for horseshoes. They're heavenly.

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