Wattleseed

A women at Tasting Histories gave her presentation on Australian Aboriginal foods and the international market. As a gift she gave us all sample packets of one of the products she examined: wattleseed. Wattleseed is described as having a coffee, hazelnut type flavor. This is more of a coffee and roasted hazelnuts, rather than a "hazelnut coffee", which is a flavor that should never have been crated. Apparently wattleseed is one of the new chic dessert spices and I decided to give it a whirl. I decided to make two kinds of wattle seed cupcakes with wattleseed frosting. The first recipe used this plain vanilla cupcake recipe from joyofbaking.com. I made the recipe true to form adn just dumped 1.5 tsp of wattleseed into the batter. The flavor was very light, but noticeable. The cupcakes turned out a bit drier than I like my vanilla cupcakes to be(more like scones than cupcakes), but I didn't have the 5 eggs necessary for Martha Stuart's recipe (which I would use in the future. For the second set of cupcakes, I used deep chocolate Better than Sex Cupcakes.

After making a 1/2 batch of each I topped them with this made up cream cheese frosting:
1 stick cream cheese (cold)
1 stick butter softened
1 box powdered sugar
2 tsp wattle seed soaked in 1/4 c. warm water for 10 minutes

Basically beat the cream cheese and butter, add powdered sugar and add the wattleseed brew (wattle seeds and all) instead of milk.


Both cupcakes were wonderful and I had to prevent my self from eating every last bit o the frosting out of the mixing bowl. I really like the idea of using the same frosting on different cupcake "bases" for a variety of flavors. If you're looking for a non-vanilla based alternative to chocolate desserts, I highly recommend wattleseed. You have to order it, and it's a little pricy, but much like desserts made with cardamon it's a wonderfully unique flavor for the American palette (and so much more exciting than vanilla!).

(no pics of my own, I forgot to take some while I was scarfing down cupcakes. Inspirations here and here).