White Chocolate covered Maraschino Cherry Cupcakes

I made this recipe in cake form at Christmas and fell in love with it.  The original recipe for the cake comes from Bird On A Cake site.  That girl can cook!  I’ve made several recipes from her site and all have been winners.  For these cupcakes I needed a white icing to tie into the decoration theme at my nieces baby shower.  I needed to provide an icing without chocolate because of food allergies some of the guests have so I chose a ganache using Wilton white candy melts.  Some of the cupcakes have dark chocolate covered cherries as garnish and some have cherries with no covering.  I like the way they look in the final set up, don’t you?  The icing was really tasty.  Check out the pink and green baby shower where we served them.

Maraschino Cherry Cupcakes

Preheat oven 350 F.  Place cupcake liners in cupcake pan. (makes 2 dozen).  If you plan to use the ganache for icing, I would make the icing first so it can start cooling while you make the cakes.

• 2 jars Maraschino cherries (one jar needs stems)

Drain and chop 1 10 oz jar of cherries without stems (reserve liquid to go in batter).  Shake them in a Tablespoon or 2 of flour so they won’t lump together in the batter.
Drain and rinse the remaining stemmed cherries.  Put the cherries on paper towels to dry.  I also patted them with a paper towel a bit and turned them over once.   I went to several stores before finding cherries with stems.  Finally found them at Kroger. 
Beat until creamy:

• 1/2 Cup butter, soft
• 1 1/2 Cups sugar
• Beat in 3 egg whites

Whisk together and add alternately with liquids:

• 2 Cups flour
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 Tablespoon baking powder

Liquids:

• 1 Cup Sour Cream
• Reserved Cherry juice from 1 jar
• 1 teaspoon Cherry extract (if you don’t have any, I found you can substitute a teaspoon unsweetened Kool-ade)
• Stir in 1 jar of chopped Maraschino cherries

Fill cupcake liners 1/2 full. Bake cupcakes 20-25 minutes till they spring back in the centers when you touch them.  Cool.

Chocolate Covered Cherries

While the cakes cool, melt about a cup of chocolate chips in the microwave for 30 seconds.  Stir till smooth.  If they don’t all melt, microwave a little more in 15 second intervals.  Dip dry Stemmed Maraschino Cherries in the melted chocolate and stand on wax paper.  They will garnish the top of the cupcakes.  If you have guests with Chocolate allergies, like we did, leave some of the cherries plain.

White Chocolate Ganache

Microwave

• 1/2 Cup Heavy Whipping Cream 2-3 minutes (don’t let it boil over)

Remove from microwave . Add and Stir until melted and smooth:

• 12 oz Wilton White Candy Melts
• 6 Tablespoons butter
• 2 Tablespoons powder sugar

Allow to cool  completely (about 30 minutes-an hour).  Beat with mixer until peaks form.  Use icing bag or zip lock bag with a small hole cut out of one corner to pipe the icing onto the cooled cupcakes.  Place a stemmed cherry on top of each for garnish.  There were a lot of extra stemmed cherries left, so I coated those in chocolate and served separately.  If you don’t have allergies to chocolate, substitute semi sweet chocolate pieces for the candy melts.  It really gives the cake the taste of a a chocolate covered cherry!

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Chocolate wasted.

Son in law LOVES chocolate.  Well, most everyone does.  I have saved a cake photo on my dessert Pinterest board waiting for his December birthday. It didn't go quite as I planned and I could almost send it to the Pintrosity site!

First, I asked hubs to pick up some chocolate candies while he was out, then after he left I started the cake.  Hmm.  Only I had no chocolate cake mix. Yeah, I know.. it's the lazy way out, but he doesn't care if I use a mix and all the extras going on the cake will make up for it.  So anyway, I took a quick trip to a nearby store and bought a chocolate cake mix.  I turned on the oven to preheat and got busy mixing up the cake.  THEN I opened the cabinet for cake pans.  I failed to remember that I packed them for storage during one of our "get ready to sell the house weekends".  I'm pretty good at improvising, so I used the jelly roll pan that was not packed with the intent to cut and stack.  This is the practically disaster part:  cake mixes are softer in texture and although it stacked okay, icing those crumbly sides was not working. (No, there are no pictures, I didn't know it was going to be such an ordeal)  I put the cake in the deep freezer and waited.  Once it was frozen stiff, I trimmed the sides square and finished icing it with a dark chocolate butter cream, placed it back in the freezer to firm up the icing for the next phase.

Once it was firm, I pulled it back out and added another layer of milk chocolate butter cream so I could press on mini semi sweet chocolate pieces all over the cake.  A variety of chocolate candy bars was chopped and placed on top with some finely crushed Oreo cookies and a chocolate ganache dribbled over the cake and some maraschino cherries finished it off.

If this doesn't make him chocolate wasted...nothing will!

I did make the butter cream icings.  One using melted dark chocolate baking squares and one using light chocolate powder.  The ganache is made using several fun size Hershey bars, Musketeer bars, a tablespoon of the mini semi sweet chocolate chips, a teaspoon of butter and enough heavy cream to cover the chocolate in the little bowl they were in.  (maybe 1/4 cup?) Heat in the microwave 1 1/2 minutes and stir until cool.

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