Cupcake Lessons

First off, I would like to make it clear that I love to bake. And second off, I would like to make it clear that I am not actually a bad baker... sometimes my stuff doesn't come out all that pretty, or I have huge kitchen disasters, but I can guarantee it will taste delicious. A sweet tooth as discerning as mine won't allow poor flavor.

That said, I would like to show you the lessons I learned two weeks ago while making cupcakes for J's first bridal shower.

Cakes seem to be my biggest visual challenges - again, tastes good/looks like crap. Case in point, there was this disaster several years ago:













The icing on this actually broke the mixer! But it tasted divine. Frustrating, but funny.

But, to that point, I'm not really a big cake eater anyway - I much prefer cookies, brownies, bars, puddings, fudge, etc. So I don't make cakes very often, and I especially never make cupcakes. They're cute, but each batch has 12-24 chances to have a disaster like the one you just saw.

But, I said I'd make cupcakes, so make cupcakes I did. Add to this the fact that they had to be transported 7 hours across the state over the course of 3 days, and I had a serious challenge. And who else to answer a serious challenge than... Martha Stewart?! I found a delicious recipe in her Baking Handbook (which has pulled-through for me in the past) and set to work.

So, the lessons I learned...

1. Put your batter in a small measuring cup with a pouring lip. If you try to spoon a drizzly batter into 24 little cups, you will make an unforgivable mess. This is just a taste of it... it was actually all over the floor, on my sweatpants, and in my hair. And probably found in other places later.














2. Don't bake more than 1 sheet of 12 cupcakes in the oven at a time. Proper oven circulation is necessary in order to bake the cupcakes evenly, but if you fill 2 oven shelves with cupcakes... the bottom pan will overflow, and the top pan will look lovely. And lesson 2a: If you do make this mistake, switching the top pan to the bottom (and vice versa) halfway through will mean all of your cupcakes will overflow, not just one pan. And lesson 2b: If your oven thermometer hangs down from the top rack, don't - DO NOT - pull that top rack out if you have a tray of cupcakes sitting on the bottom rack... your thermometer will drag right through the batter, and perhaps even fall directly into a cupcake cup. ahem..


3. Even though Martha says the batter will make 24 cupcakes, if your cupcake cups are looking a little too full, trust your gut and put less batter in the cup. Okay, it's a new recipe and it's kind of runny, so maybe it doesn't fluff up as much as other cupcakes do? No. Martha can be wrong sometimes. (Reflecting back on it... I think it could have made 36 cupcakes actually.)

4. Did you know that you can buy cupcake/muffin liners that will stand alone to bake your cupcakes without needing a pan? You just put them on a tray and bake them.














Well... they don't really work. At least, they didn't work for me. Unless it's actually because I baked that little batch in the toaster oven instead of the real oven? (oh my, this is worse than I realized) ... see below:



















4. If you experience all of the above disasters, the only fix that will get you uniform cupcakes (besides scrapping it and starting over) is to trim off all of the edges with a serrated knife. This works extremely well, but will take a good half an hour of your time. Bonus: you'll have a bowl of delicious cake scraps left over for yourself (to dip in the extra icing... we're getting there).



















5. Any recipe that calls for a pound of butter and a half-dozen eggs.. and not much else... is probably going to be runny unless you mix it right. 5a: You can't mix it "Martha Stewart right" if you don't have a KitchenAid mixer. 5b: Ergo, your icing is going to be runny. 5c: Powdered sugar will thicken it up. 5d: Powdered sugar added to an already sweet recipe will make even this sweet tooth hurt.

6. Highly-concentrated teal food coloring WILL turn everything teal. Tongue, teeth, hands, eyebrows, countertop, etc. It will.

7. And after all of this... if you have a good recipe, and all of the necessary ingredients made their way into that recipe... it will still taste good. :-)