Araminta’s Solo Triple Berry Cupcakes

When making up the grocery list this week, Araminta pointed out that if we continue cooking consecutively through Cupcakes: Luscious bakeshop favorites from your home kitchen , we will be making berry cupcakes in, say, November. Hmmm. Re-plan; she’s right about that! So I picked up lovely fresh berries, but then got slammed with a tidal wave of errands on Saturday, not particularly negotiable, and Lucinda’s allergies flared horribly. The cupcakes we’d chosen were complicated, too, since they were filled, and used cream cheese frosting, which we’d not done before.

No problem for Araminta! Bravely prepping as I head out the door:




And I arrived home to find a beautiful batch of cupcakes:




The vanilla cupcakes were everything a cupcake should be: moist and flavorful, just perfect. They had a raspberry filling, and the cream cheese frosting was delicious as well. I have to apologize for my blurry shot again, but had to show you a cut-open cupcake:



Congratulations to Araminta on a really professional cupcake! 



 

Yellow Cupcakes with Chocolate Buttercream Frosting

Our second cupcake making Saturday with filled with problems and interruptions! We were strangely out of eggs – strangely because our ducks keep us well-supplied in general, but we’d been having a lot of morning scrambles, and huevos rancheros was on the menu last week. So a run to the grocery first thing in the morning for cocoa powder, another run later for eggs, that sort of thing. It was so disjointed I forgot to take pics!

I will report, though, that the frosting (same recipe as last week with the addition of chocolate) worked very well this week. The thing about doing buttercream in this way – sugar and egg whites in a double boiler before whipping – is that the end result does seem very light and silky. Not necessarily better than a thicker buttercream, but good to have in the arsenal when light and silky would be a better option. The cupcake itself, again, was a pretty stock yellow cake. Good, but not exceptional.

Araminta and Lucinda, when left undirected for decorating, have their own styles.

Araminta’s cupcakes:




And Lucinda’s somewhat ebullient style:

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.