Baking With Brody: The Puppy Cuppy

I am, to put it mildly, really into cupcakes. I think they are amazing. Adorable, teeny tiny little bites of cake heaven in a portable handheld form. When cupcakes started coming back into fashion a couple of years ago, I sighed, knowing my waistline was doomed. In their sugary clutches, I am powerless.

I’ve sampled some of the wares from local cupcakeries, most recently the Sprinkles that opened up about a half an hour from my house- which is a relatively safe distance. This week, I discovered Pubcakes, a cupcake bakery and coffee house, a couple of blocks from one of my favorite local bistros. This could be bad.

You might think the combination of beer and cupcakes an odd one, which I did at first, so I had to sample for myself just to prove how horrible they were going to be. I was sorely disappointed in how not-bad they were when I went on Tuesday, so I had to go again on Saturday just to verify that they were, in fact, amazingly delicious. This is definitely bad.

Good for the dogs, though. With all these cupcakes around and me in a cuppy state of mind, I decided that the dogs deserved a little something for all the longing looks they were throwing me when I was most decidedly not sharing any of my people cupcakes with them. So I decided to give this recipe a whirl:

Carrot Cake Dog Cupcakes With Cream Cheese Icing

from DogTreatKitchen.com

Ingredients

Muffins:

• 2 cups shredded carrots
• 3 eggs
• 1/2 cup applesauce, unsweetened
• 2 tsp. cinnamon
• 1/2 cup rolled oats
• 3 cups whole wheat flour
• 1 tbsp baking powder *

Frosting:

• 8 oz. low fat cream cheese, softened
• 1/4 cup applesauce, unsweetened

In a medium mixing bowl, mix the first three ingredients. (If you don’t have a Microplane grater yet and you do any amount of shredding, you have to get one! I finally picked one up this week and it is seriously fantastic. I am a grating machine.)

In a second bowl, mix together the dry ingredients, then add to the applesauce mixture. *The original recipe does not have baking powder. I did an experiment and added 1 tsp baking powder per cup of flour to half of the dry mixture to see if it would get them to rise a little, because I like making things more complicated than they need to be.

This is a very dry batter. When you put it into your muffin tins, make sure to press it in really well because it isn’t going to spread on its own, and you want them to be nice and circular.

The original recipe calls for 25 minutes in a 350 degree oven; since I was using mini muffins I only put them in for 10 minutes. Perfecto!

This is the result of my baking powder science experiment. As you can see, the baking powder did make a difference. Your dog won’t care, but you might.

Cream cheese frosting is notoriously difficult to work with. I spent a lot of time angrily putting my pastry bag back in the refrigerator while the dogs were running in circles giving me the dog equivalent of “Get on with it already!”

I’d just glop it on like a glaze next time. It looked just as nice (especially on the ones with the baking powder), saves a lot of time, and tastes the exact same. After all, these are dog cupcakes, right?

Though if you stole one for yourself, I wouldn’t blame you.