Friday, July 15, 2011

Gastronomical Exploration: Diva's Cupcakes

More flavors I haven't tried at Diva's! Lavender-Lemon and Red Velvet cupcakes. Red Velvet cupcake doesn't seem like such an unusual flavor...but the thing is, I've never had a store-bought Red Velvet cake before, at least not that I recall. I've baked one before, for a friend of mine. I layered it with vanilla cheesecake to make this Red Velvet cheesecake torte, drizzled the entire thing with chocolate ganache, and finished it with creamcheese frosting. Yes. It was delicious. And artery-clogging rich. The cake itself had this in-between vanilla and chocolate flavor; it definitely wasn't vanilla, but it wasn't quite chocolate either. I wasn't sure if that was how Red Velvet cakes were supposed to taste--and it was about time I found out.

The Red Velvet had the cake crumb and the Lavender-Lemon had a lemon-colored sanding sugar topping. Both added a nice little texture to the creamy frosting.

We tried the Lavender-Lemon first. The cream itself didn't taste too much like lavender, but the cake was really good--lemon with lavender blossoms incorporated into the cake. You get this taste of lavender every time you hit the lavender, and the surrounding lemon flavor of the cake rounds everything off. The cake had fine crumbs, moist but not soggy exactly like the vanilla cupcake I baked the other day--which my Mom claimed was "too crumbly". Sorry Mom, that means that the cake had been made correctly. Otherwise, the cake turns dense and tough, and can potentially be turned into a lethal weapon (i.e. the Chinese fighting muffin from Charlie's Angels). The buttercream was, as usual, very light and oh-so-smooth...but now I think that there maybe too much of it. Looking at the photo, it appears that the cake to frosting ratio is too much, probably around 1:0.7

Red Velvet. This one was fine-crumbed too, but a wee bit dry. It had indeed, that vanilla-chocolate hybrid flavor that mine had (except mine was way more moist). And the frosting didn't taste like creamcheese--it was probably just vanilla. And there was too much of it.
Overall, very good taste and great frosting. They just need to tone down on the amount of cream.

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