Chocolate Cupcakes with Chocolate Ganache and Pi

I have been posting wayyyy too much pumpkin lately. I love fall, but I have 3 other fall-themed desserts to post. I decided to take a break and to do something different. I'm posting my Chocolate, Marshmallow-filled cupcakes with topped with Chocolate Ganache. SOOOO GOOD!


The cupcake is a standard chocolate cupcake (did I ever post my recipe?) with piped marshmallow fluff inside. For the Ganache, I used a simple recipe:

♥ Chocoalte Ganache Topping:

12 ounces (360 gr) High quality dark/ bittersweet chocolate
2 cups (500ml) heavy cream

In a double-boiler, melt the chocoate, be careful not to scorch it, begin to melt it down, remove from heat, stir, if need be return to heat. Make sure all the chocoate is melted, and there are no chunks.

Remove from heat, let sit.

In a saucepan, bring cream to a low, 30 sec simmer. Remove from heat immediately, and pour over chocolate. Do not stir. Let sit 3 minutes.

Now stir mix and incorporate fully. It will be very runny, that's okay! Place in fridge, and stir every 10 minutes or so. Keep doing so until mixture thickens and is the consistency of cream-cheese. Now, take out of fridge and whip for a minute with a blender (fluffs it up). Pipe immediately.

NOTE: IF you let it get too hard, you can melt down a little (by re-heating it over double boiler) and repeat the previous steps. It comes back to life.

The funny think about ganache is that it may seem unstable at room temperature, but it's not going anywhere. You can leave it for about 2 days or so before you should start worrying about it. Otherwise, you can keep it in the fridge. It does melt in the hand, but that's all... so it's messy to play with, but perfect to look at and eat! These cupcakes did not have as much chocolate on them because the chocoate was so rich (I used LIND chocolate).

(Decorative Sugar Flower: Tutorial Here)

Now, of course every blogger takes a million pictures of their baking and posts only what looks nice or staged. In one case, I didn't. Since these cupcakes were to celebrate a new member to the school's Math staff, I made a few cupcakes with Pi numbers... Now, being a 'dink,' I can cite pi to the 20th digit: 3.1415926535897932384... well... yeah. It is a useless skill I acquired trying to compete with my stupidly smart brother. He truly is a genius, but also a 'dink' (Waves fist in air in a frustrated manner).

FLASHBACK:
When I was young, I would take sidewalk chalk and write out the numbers in pi until I ran out of space and would walk back to count out what I had written. I did that too often.

:: reflecting ::
I must have been a lonely kid.

Anyway, for this particular celebration, I wrote out pi on the cupcakes, but they were not pretty, just functional.

So there you have it. A happy, and depressing story in one post!

My husband likes to show me this comic... a little crude... but true!

Person 1: Co-worker

Person 2: My hubbie (he looks that clueless, I swear)

Person 3: Me... with a beard... and as a man... but the rest is true. My head is square...