First Cupcake Saturday

Araminta and Lucinda were ready bright and early to have our first cupcake lesson, but sadly, it hadn’t occurred to me to get the butter out the night before. Ah well. It was softened pretty quickly and we began our classic cookthrough of Cupcakes: Luscious bakeshop favorites from your home kitchen with the very first cupcake – vanilla with vanilla buttercream frosting.

Araminta mixing the dry ingredients. The girls need to wear nitrile gloves to handle this wheat and dairy, and Lucinda isn’t able to be near the flour until it’s incorporated into the moist ingredients.

Lucinda mans the mixer

The cupcakes turned out a wee dry, but had a good flavor. I took two bites to check :-). The consensus was for girlie decorations on the piped-on frosting.

The only thing that didn’t work for us in this recipe was the method for making buttercream. We consulted our in-house expert, Clara, who looked over the recipe and said that she’d tried that method twice and didn’t have success herself at it. Sugar and egg whites are heated to pasteurize the raw egg, then this mixture is beaten until stiff peaks form. After over a half hour of beating, we finally gave up at the soft peak stage and felt grateful we’d achieved that! We’ll give the recipe one more try next Saturday, then if we have similar results, we’ll move to other methods of doing buttercream. 

All in all, a good solid vanilla cupcake. It was tasty but fairly utilitarian.