the early bird special

Saturday is my boss's birthday, so today I brought in this pile of technicolor cupcakes to create an occassion to eat sweets in the file room and precede the lunch celebration of pizza in the conference room. The cakes were the "Devil's Food Cake Cockaigne" recipe from The Joy of Cooking, a recipe which I began to rue bitterly after the fifth bowl I had to dirty to follow the instructions. After tasting the end result though, I can say with the certainty of a girl that clearly hasn't done any of the dishes yet that the mess is justified. It is absolutely one of the best chocolate cake recipes I've ever tasted. In general, I've yet to encounter a baked good recipe in The Joy of Cooking which produced anything less than stellar results. The frosting is my standard improvised buttercream, colored richly with the fancy food coloring I bought at that cookie store in Ballard. Half the cakes were nestled in plain ice cream cones, a technique I first saw at the 826 benefit earlier this summer but had never tried before. Spooning the batter in the cones and baking them is even easier than one would imagine, except the next time I do it I will fill each cone almost to full (rather than 2/3) hoping that the cakes would rise in fuller domes to approximate a real scoop of ice cream.