The Cookbook Challenge - Week 2 - Indian - Chai Cupcakes

I love Indian food. Tandoori, dhal makhani, jahlfrezi, naan, sweet, sweet naan… love it. I thought I could pull out my Indian cookbooks and whip up a curry, but fate stepped in and while I was looking through 500 Cupcakes for the citrus challenge, I came across these:

Chai cupcakes

There is a variation in the book which is for vanilla and white chocolate chai cupcakes, and since I received my order from USA Foods of Hershey’s white chocolate cinnamon chips last week, I thought they’d go perfectly with the Bondi Chai Club Cinnamon. 

 

 Perfect match?

Ok, so Bondi isn’t terribly Indian. Let’s focus on the chai and cinnamon part.

The Hershey's chips were shipped on what must have been the hottest day of the year and were left at my front door. They were in a semi-solid mass on my arrival home from work.

I needed to do some chopping, bashing it on the bench a few times did most of the work, but it just needed a little more.

I didn’t bother to look for buttermilk in the supermarket, to create 2/3 cup of buttermilk substitute I used 2/3 tablespoon of lemon juice and added enough regular milk to make up 2/3 cup.

That looks a lot more like a dough than a batter, and is almost too much for my monster 320 watt Breville Wizz mixer to handle. It certainly made some noises which indicated it was not overly impressed with what it was being asked to do. Set facial expression to sceptical… now.

The mixture was really thick and sticky, I wasn’t really sure how they’d go. I kept re-checking the recipe to see if I’d misread something or omitted an ingredient, but I couldn’t work out what I’d done wrong. From the baked result, looks like I didn’t do anything wrong (which was nice after my recent brownie misadventure).

I thought apple would go really well with the cinnamon, so tried baking a slice of apple on the top of a couple of the cupcakes. Taste wise this was a good idea although I’m not sold on the final presentation. Next time smaller apples, whole circle slices, less full cups.

What I found interesting about these cupcakes is that they only use egg whites, and no yolks. It’s the first cupcake I’ve come across that does that.

Chai cupcakes – 500 Cupcakes

2 cups self-raising flour
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
pinch of salt
1 tablespoon chai tea powder (I used Bondi Chai Club Cinnamon)
1/4 cup sweet butter, softened (I assumed this just meant unsalted)
3/4 cup packed light brown sugar (I used regular brown sugar – anyone know what ‘light brown sugar’ is?)
2 egg whites
2/3 cup buttermilk

Preheat the oven to 175 degrees celsius (I preheated mine to 175 with the fan on, and it actually maintained its temperature – I think that’s the secret with my temperamental oven, use the fan).

Place 12 baking cups in a muffin pan. Mix the flour, baking powder, salt and chai powder. In a separate bowl beat the butter and sugar until smooth (I found smooth was a flexible term, just beat it until you get bored – that’s what I did). Add egg whites slowly, beating well, then slowly add the dry ingredients, then the buttermilk.

At this point if you want to do the white chocolate and vanilla variation, this is  where you add ½ cup of white chocolate chips and 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract. I added ½ cup of Hershey’s cinnamon chips, and no vanilla.

Bake for 20 minutes (mine took 20 minutes exactly).

The recipe suggests that it makes 12, and that’s what I produced, but next time I will make them smaller and make 18. And you can re-set your facial expression to hungry now, turns out my pessimism was unjustified.

And just because the book is such a pretty pink....