Where's my glossy sheen??

I'm taking advantage of the fact that it's Sunday and trying to do about three different types of cupcakes. I'm going to have to do this on weekends as much as I can if I want to accomplish 500 in 368 days.

This will be my ninth cupcake. Classic chocolate buttercream cupcakes.

Now before I started this little project I had made these already, so lucky for me I had some notes on them already, because the first attempt needed some adjustments.

So this time around I used unsalted butter for the cupcakes, and I added more heavy cream to the frosting. Last time the frosting was a sticky gooey mess that didn't have a sheen to them at all. The picture in the cookbook shows the frosting light and shiny. This isn't the case at all. Even in my second attempt I couldn't get it to look like the picture. There is an improvement I'll say that for sure. I probably tripled the amount of heavy cream it asked for to make it more smooth, which it did. But when it sets, it becomes clumpy and weird looking.

I think the next time I'll try using a double boiler to melt the chocolate and butter, that's what I use when I make brownies. So hopefully that will treat the chocolate a little better instead of directly heating it on the stove.

Photographer: Travis J. Premo