More Baking

I made these cupcakes for a barbecue last weekend.  I've had some leftover mango puree in my freezer for awhile, as well as some mango preserves left over from my last baking adventure, and I thought pairing mango with lemon and ginger could make for an interesting flavor combination.  I decided to go with lemon ginger cake topped with mango chocolate ganache.I used this lemon cake recipe from Chockylit, except that I doubled it and added about 3/4 cup of diced candied ginger.  (The most time consuming process of the entire recipe was chopping up the candied ginger -- it took about 45 minutes.)

I also used a doubled version of her mango chocolate ganache recipe.  I was worried that the mango preserves might make the frosting too sweet, so instead of using both semisweet and bittersweet chocolate, I only used bittersweet chocolate.  (72% cacao to be exact.)  I had about half a cup of pureed mango and 7 ounces of mango preserves, and added all of it to the chocolate ganache.  I also beat the ganache with a cup of powdered sugar to stiffen it up.  Ultimately I shouldn't have doubled the recipe -- I only used about half of the frosting.  Oh well, I guess I'll have to come up with another cake that goes well with mango chocolate ganache!

At the end of the day the cake wasn't my cup of tea.  Despite the ridiculous amount of sugar the recipe called for, the cake wasn't sweet at all, and the ginger and lemon pairing was a mite bitter.  My friends, however, claimed to love it, enjoying the fact that it wasn't sweet like traditional cupcakes.  I think they were just flattering me.  The mango ganache, on the other hand, was amazing, despite the fact that I hate dark chocolate.  The preserves and powdered sugar added the perfect amount of sweetness to temper the bite of the bittersweet chocolate.  I couldn't really taste the mango when I ate the cupcake as a whole (there was just a hint of fruitiness), but when I ate the frosting alone the mango was quite noticeable.  If I were to make this cupcake again, I'd fill the cake with the mango to make it a bit sweeter, and use a regular semi/bittersweet chocolate ganache.