Best Cupcakes Ever!

I made these cupcakes for Memorial Day a couple years ago and they were absolutely delicious. So below I’m posting the recipe I put together verbatim:

Peach Amaretto Cupcakes (makes 24)

Roasted Peach Mush:

• Halve and pit four medium peaches
• Preheat oven at 350
• Let cool then scoop out and mush

Cupcake Batter:

• · Preheat oven at 350
• 3 cups flour
• 2 tsp baking powder
• ½ tsp salt
• 2 ½ cups sugar
• 1cup unsalted butter (Oberweis sweet cream butter)
• 6 eggs
• 2 tsp vanilla
• 1 ½ cup milk, amaretto, and orange juice (proportioned to taste)
• Roasted peach mush

Filling:

• Marzipan
• Peach Butter

Using electric an mixer, beat together sugar and butter until well combined. Add eggs one at a time until light and fluffy. Prepare rest of wet and dry ingredients separately and alternately add slowly to mixture. Beat until smooth. Fold in peaches. Pour batter into cupcake tins halfway. Roll marzipan balls and dip in peach butter then drop into cupcake tins and let settle. Cover marzipan balls with batter until full. Bake for 28-34 minutes or until golden brown and tops of cupcakes spring back lightly when touched.

Peach-Amaretto Crisp

Peach crisp is a fairly low maintenance desert. In fact, I chose to make it because of how difficult it is to mess up! My only real fault was that I didn’t wait for the peaches to fully ripen, but that’s more bad luck than anything else. I also followed a Maida Heatter recipe that included much more butter in the crisp than I really wanted. In fact, I wasn’t aware that a crisp should include butter at all! It felt more like making a pie dough, which was exactly what I was trying to avoid. For once, Maida has lead me astray!

Peach-Amaretto Filling (flavor to taste):

• Peaches (2)
• Brown sugar
• Cinnamon *
• Cloves
• Nutmeg
• Pinch of salt
• Amaretto
• Vanilla
• A squeeze of lemon juice if you have it

* I am somewhat of a cinnamon snob. I use a combination of Chinese Cassia and Extra Fancy Vietnamese cinnamon from Penzeys Spices. If you CLICK HERE they give a helpful description of each varieties flavor characteristics.

Maida Heatter’s Crisp:

• 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
• 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1/2 cup dark brown sugar
• 1 stick unsalted butter
• 1/2 cup “old fashioned” Quaker oats
• + added a handfull of chopped walnuts instead of pecans

As far as the filling goes, mix all of the ingredients sparingly. Just enough sugar to help caramelization as the peaches themselves should be sweet enough … unless your peaches are as under-ripe as mine were   If you like you can also add other natural sweeteners like honey or agave nectar. You want to give this mixture time to sit as it will begin to generate its own juice/syrup. So now is the perfect time to start on your crisp!

Peaches Macerating

I never was good at following directions, which is just asking for trouble when it comes to baking, but i prefer to go by feel. So I just added all the ingredients to a big bowl and diced the stick of butter as Maida’s technique sounded exactly like what one does to a pie dough… right down to advocating the use of a pastry cutter. Do you have a pastry cutter? Neither do I! Luckily I grew up using the old-school method of two knives and am quite handy at it.

Out-of-place pastry cutting... where are you taking me Maida?

That said, this never acheived the consistency Maida said it should… like a pie dough does. (Yes, I checked to see if any pages had stuck together and I somehow was reading two separate recipes a la Goofy)  However, this method is laborious and unnecessary. What would be more effective is to use half a stick of butter and melt it in the microwave and add it to the dry ingredients. Adding the peach mixture to your baking dish of choice (in my case a small casserole dish) and cover with the crisp mixture. Bake at 375 for about 30 minutes or until golden brown and the peachy juicy goodness is bubbling up around the edges.

In the oven

Golden brown, juicy, and delicious!

Tucking in!

The great part about only having two peaches to work with is that I had lots of leftover crisp that makes super delicious granola! So I spread the excess out on a baking sheet lined with tin foil and let it brown as well. It was done well before the Peach-Amaretto Crisp so I took it out and let it rest until still warm, but handle-able and then broke it into peices.

- Kate

Granola Bonus XD