May 3, 2007
Cupcakes… a tale of selfish desserts.
I am a fan of cupcakes and I always have been. Ask any of my former roommates who I have subjected to countless batches, including one who witnessed me calling the police department when an entire batch went missing from my kitchen. (Yes, I’m serious. No, the cupcakes were never found and the SFPD fondly refers to the incident as the great cupcake caper.)
But who doesn’t love cupcakes? They’re cute and little, they taste good and they’re all about YOU!
It’s a cake just for you. A miniature marvel of sugary goodness reserved for your taste buds only. Want to lick all the frosting off? No one’s going to stop you. Want to dig your finger straight into the middle? No one will balk at the thought of getting your germs into THEIR SLICE because the whole cupcakes is YOURS YOURS YOURS.
Perhaps this is why I love them so much. Now that I’m older and have developed a taste for higher quality food, I feel my cupcakes should follow suit. Luckily, in the past couple of years cupcakes have gained popularity among foodies and trendsetters. They’ve made their way over from New York to the bakeries of San Francisco. And while we are blessed here in the city by the bay with lovely establishments such as Citizen Cupcake, Kara’s Cupcakes and American Cupcake, this is a blog all about DIY food. Bringing the bakery to your kitchen. (And personally, I always find homemade cupcakes to taste better than the store variety, with the exception of Sibby’s Cupcakery where the cream cheese frosting has reached a level of perfection I can only dream of one day matching.)
In honor of the desserts I love so very much, I’m dedicating my first Feeding Fashionistas post to cupcakes.
My coworker noticed how much I love cupcakes and let me borrow a book called (appropriately) Cupcakes.
It is full of almost fifty recipes for different types of cupcakes. Our arrangement was that I would keep the book as long as I wanted, providing I brought her samples of each batch I tried out. Fair enough. So far I have found all of the recipes to be relatively fool-proof and easy. They produce great tasting batches with minimal ingredients and a meagerly outfitted kitchen. If I can make cupcakes from scratch… YOU can make cupcakes from scratch.
At the bare minimum, you need two mixing bowls, a whisk, a wooden spoon, measuring spoons, measuring cups, cupcake pans to bake almost any kind of cupcake! I would recommend getting an electric hand mixer (for reasons I will state later) but it’s not absolutely necessary to have one. A whisk does the same thing.
I use silicone cupcake pans, but sometimes they don’t lay completely flat in the oven and result in uneven cupcakes. If this bothers you, use metal pans. If you are like me and prefer the slightly off-kilter, silicone are easier to clean and don’t require cupcake pan liners.
Vanessa and I decided to tackle a recipe in the book that was slightly more complicated than your everyday straight forward cupcake. We wanted to to make SNOWBALLS. You know, like the hostess variety? Coconut covered marshmallowy goodness? Only ours were going to be sans-preservatives (and plastic wrapping).
The first step to making these was to create a lemon curd filling. Surprisingly, this was easy. I’ve purposely chosen to keep my kitchen sparse for the time being, so we made do with what I already had. Vanessa and I used a normal saucepan to cook the lemon filling. Later in the recipe we fashioned a double boiler out of a normal heat-proof glass bowl over the same saucepot. This kind of double boiler works for melting chocolate for cupcake recipes, fillings and frostings. The lemon curd used fresh lemon juice, egg yolks, sugar and cream of tartar, cooked in the saucepan until thick. This was put in a dish with plastic wrap pushed into it and holes punctured to let steam out.
Vanessa and I probably could have quit there and just sat eating lemon curd for the remainder of the afternoon, but the rest of the recipe was calling!
The actual cupcake batter was a white batter with some mix of butter, sugar, egg whites, flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, and vanilla. Without the recipe in front of me I can’t remember exact amounts. Unfortunately, baking is somewhat of an exact science. Unlike cooking, where you can throw a bunch of ingredients in to taste, baking that magically perfect concoction requires specific measurements. The recipe called for egg whites to be electronically whipped with Cream of Tartar to stiff white peaks. This is where I suggest actually having an electric mixer. Vanessa and I whipped the eggs by hand and it took a good 45 minutes before anything resembling a snowy foothill took shape, let alone a stiff peak. I actually developed blisters on my hands. This is one place where I would say it’s worth spending the money on a kitchen gadget. Get one of the simple handheld ones that can also be used to mix smoothies and blend soup. Then you’ve got a compact kitchen electronic wand that can multi-task.
Once the egg mixture was folded into the rest of the batter we scooped it into cupcake pans. I prefer a cupcake liner to be filled 3/4ths of the way full with batter. This leads to slight spilling over the top, referred to as “Muffin Top” (also an affectionate name for the spillage chubby guys get over the waistband of their pants). Since we were going to be filling these cupcakes, it was necessary to get a nice sized cake that would be sturdy enough to stand on it’s own once we cut out the middle. Here is another place where silicone pans are nice: the batter will not stick to the pan when it spills over the liner, even if you don’t spray it with cooking spray.
Voila! Cupcakes out of the oven!
They baked up slightly smaller than I anticipated, but beautiful nonetheless.
On to filling! A pastry bag is needed to pipe filling into the cupcakes. Here is another area where I choose to get crafty, rather than invest in something I didn’t need. I use ziplock bags rather than pastry bags. By scooping all of the lemon filling into the ziplock and cutting off the tip of one corner, I had a pastry bag. This is a great cheap technique for filling things like deviled eggs, as well. Using a sharp tipped knife, I cut a cone shape out the center of each cupcake. All of these cones were fed to Johnny, who was patiently waiting for our baking to be finished. Using the ziplock frosting bag I piped lemon filling into the snowballs-to-be.
And now… for the frosting!
Here is where we enter the Olympics of cupcake making for Vanessa and me. Now we had to whisk eggs/sugar/cream of tartar into peaks again, this time over a double boiler. The recipe is titled “Seven Minute Frosting.” Which would have been awesome, had we the foresight to purchase an electric mixer. As it was, we were still stuck with the whisk. But if you’re trying to put Martha Stewart to shame, well, you’d better do it the hard way. No cheating! Suspending the increasingly hot bowl over boiling water WHILE whisking took some serious coordination. (which we lack) After spilling most of the water into the stove and putting the pilot light out on our first go we finally got it right. (After disassembling the stove to relight the pilot.)
After we added vanilla the resulting mixture was truly marshmallow like. I’m not sure if it was supposed to be quite so sticky, or if it has just baked too long while we were trying to whisk it.
In fact, I think this is the recipe for marshmallows if you bake it even longer. While it was still warm and gooey, we scooped it atop the lemon-filled cupcakes where it rounded itself nicely. At this point we were about four hours deep into the whole experiment and ready to eat our spoils, but we needed the finishing touch. Lovely shredded white tropical fruit… coconut. The technique that seemed to work best was dumping the coconut over the marshmallow topping until every conceivable sticky surface was adhering to the shavings. Done and Done.
Seriously. To. Die. For. There are no words to properly describe fluffy white marshmallowy lemony goodness…
At that point we were also hungry for dinner so I whipped up one of my new favorites… cornmeal crust goat cheese pizza with fresh basil and julliened sundried tomatoes. Unlike most of the members of this group, I eat meat, however I avoid most dairy like the plague. I’ve found goat cheese to be a nice alternative to cow’s cheese and have started making pizza with it. The basil I pick up at a local farmer’s market (organic and yummy). Sun dried tomatoes are from Whole Foods. It’s a fifteen minute meal. We also shelled fresh peas from the farmer’s market and had those on the side with a little European butter. I’m into easy cooking since I often work late and the only thing easier than this meal is walking to the corner to pick up OSHA Thai food takeout.
All cupcakes are made with organic materials. Whenever possible I use organic products in my kitchen. The sugar is unrefined cane sugar, which can affect the coloring of a white frosting (since it is light to dark brown in color), but this doesn’t bother me. The eggs were all free range and the ingredients were organic down to the Vanilla extract. While this can be slightly pricier, I feel that it’s worth it to use more responsible food stuffs.
So! Moral of the story? Homemade cupcakes are MUCH BETTER than store bought mix cupcakes and easy to make. You can impress coworkers and friends alike with a batch here and there. Drop the ever so casual, “I made these from scratch last night” around the water cooler and you’ve got ten new best friends. (that is if you can leave enough left over to make it to work). Also, if you happen to have kids you can kick all the other kid’s parents’ asses at bake sale time.
Filed under: Recipes, Firstposts
May 3rd, 2007 at 2:24 pm
Yum! Almost makes me want to start baking
This was a great post, I can’t wait for more!
May 3rd, 2007 at 3:50 pm
Welcome to the blog, P and V! Those look so delectable! I want one.