TWD--Cinnamon Squares

A little word to the wise about when a Tuesday's With Dorie recipe for the week is called Cinnamon Squares-- check your supply of cinnamon and make sure you aren't going to run out before making the recipe last minute.  I'm just saying.  ; )

Okay, so the recipe for Cinnamon Squares this week was chosen by Tracey of Tracey's Culinary Adventures and I thought/think the recipe looks like a good one in the book--Dorie's book, Baking From My Home to Yours.  I waited until Monday to make this.  And would you believe I ran out of cinnamon!?  I seriously only had about a teaspoon of cinnamon left out of my 18 oz. container from Costco that I knew was getting low, but what's a girl to do when school's out and all four boys are home.  I'm certainly not going to drag them all to the store!  So I made do. 

I made cupcakes.  After reading the P&Q's about problems with the cake not fully cooking in the middle and the chocolate chips sinking to the bottom, I decided that cupcakes would probably take care of those problems.  Plus I thought that cupcakes would be cute.  Little did I know how cute--Read and look on....

See--cute.

No?  Okay, how about this?

Well, they look good.  Cute cupcake liners.  Still--not quite the cute you're hoping for.  Okay, this.

See.  I piped the chocolate on one cupcake and now it's cute.    Still, that's it?  Well, I was excited to see what the inside looked like.  Did my chips sink?  Out of the 12 cupcakes this made, I chose one to slice open and what are the odds that THIS would happen?

Perfecto!

Not only did the swirl come out nicely, it made a perfect smile!  If I would have sliced the cupcake in any other direction, it would not have looked like this.  So I had to do something fun with it.

"Hey, Blue Eyes, you come here often?" she smiled coyly.  I mean, come on, how cool is that?!  Okay, get over it Katrina, it's just a cupcake.  After slicing through a couple more, NONE came out as nice as this one, but the swirl didn't sink clear to the bottom as many mentioned about their cakes.  I did sprinkle the chocolate chips with a little flour, which must have helped.

There you have it, but there a couple things about the recipe I must let you know.  When I discovered that I was just about out of cinnamon, I searched my cupboards and found a little container of a cinnamon/sugar mixture that I'd probably saved from making snickerdoodles long ago.  You must save that for future toast, you know.  It was at most 2 tablespoonfuls.  I took that and mixed the rest of the cinnamon I had and added a little more sugar to it.  I used that to sprinkle in the middle of each cupcake with the mini chocolate chips, but there was not enough to add cinnamon to the cake batter.  There was actually only enough to sprinkle on 8 cupcakes and four of them only have chips in the middle.  The ones with the cinnamon are actually better and that is saying a lot from me because I don't really love cinnamon and chocolate together.  Maybe with these it's because of all the other changes I made to the recipe to try to make it a little bit "healthier".  I'm just that way, I've got to cut things where I can and add this and that--mostly just to see if I can make it work.  These worked with the changes I made and are pretty darn good.  I am interested to see how they are the next day.

Here are the changes I made:

1  3/4 cups all purpose flour---I used 1 cup whole wheat pastry flour and 3/4 cup all purpose flour

3/4 cup whole milk---I used skim milk

I left out the espresso

2 large eggs---I used 3 tablespoons of Egg Beaters egg whites and 1 large egg

10 tablespoons butter---I used 4 tablespoons butter and 6 tablespoons fat free vanilla yogurt

I used 3 oz. mini chocolate chips

6 ounces of bittersweet chocolate---I used milk chocolate--and it's good!

These are good.  Someday I will make this recipe with more cinnamon!  Check out what everyone else did at the Tuesday's With Dorie site.   Thanks, Tracey.  You can get the recipe on the link to her DELICIOUS blog above.

Stay tuned, I've got a slew of yumminess to post coming up this week!