My First Attempt

I got this Cupcake Kit for Christmas. Complete with a lovely little recipe book and everything a cupcake-beginner needs, this became a deciding factor on my attempt to bake cupcakes officially. The “pictures looked tasty” is a deciding factor for me, apparently.

So far, I’ve only ventured through the book to use the simple recipes offered, before I decide to branch off on my own and start making grand pièce de résistance of my own. I started out fairly easy anyways, the first recipe I prepped for was a chocolate cupcake and a white chocolate cream cheese frosting. Yum, right? 

I tried this recipe the beginning of last week. I dithered for most of the week on whether I wanted to start this blog or not, (or I forgot, or I wasn’t inspired, or insert-random-excuse here), either way, it took a little while until I took the plunge. 

The recipe was insanely easy to follow. I was a little worried that to be a good cupcake baker, I’d have to stand on one foot and juggle eggs or some ridiculous cooking maneuver that I never really understand why anyone does, but it works! And they have delicious fluffy cupcakes that could be on a cupcake runway. I digress. The recipe was easy to follow, and the ingredients seemed easy enough to put together.

The hardest part I had was mixing the butter and sugar together, oddly enough. The first step; it figures! I had left my sticks of butter out all day for them to become “room temperature.” I guess room temperature according to the recipe is a lot warmer than room temperature in my kitchen. Mind you, it’s winter here, and my house isn’t exactly a tropical paradise. My kitchen also is an extension off of the house, so the heat that rises from the basement misses the kitchen. 

Anyways, the butter just kind of clumped forlornly in my mixing bowl, and clogged up my mixer in the most aggravating way; I spent a lot of the mixing process pausing to poke the butter out with a spatula before I just smooshed the whole sugar and butter mess together in hopes that it looked ‘creamy and a pale yellow colour.’ (It wasn’t really.) 

The rest of the process went by smoothly, other than my innate ability to get any powdery cooking ingredient absolutely everywhere. I added some chocolate chips I had leftover from my fudge making spree for extra goodness!

Into the oven they went! 12 little cupcake cups filled with chocolatey yum.

 Well. I didn’t burn them. That’s always a plus! 

 But the consistency of the cupcakes left much to be desired; they were kind of rubbery. The taste didn’t really make up for it either, they weren’t very chocolatey: very bland. I wasn’t sure if it was the recipe itself, or the baker at fault. My baking cocoa is in one of those obscure Hershey cocoa containers, you know the kind that I mean? The expiration date says 2015 but you’re pretty sure it’s been stuffed in the back of the cupboard since the random chocolate brownie baking stint you went on 2 years ago. Oops. Not to mention, my aggravation with the butter and sugar mixing earlier. Was I supposed to mix it more? Next time, I’m going to try and make the butter at a more ideal temperature before I start to mix it!

 I decided to smother the whole unsatisfying batch with white chocolate cream cheese icing. The recipe again, came from the cupcake book. With my butter incident in mind, I softened my cream cheese in the microwave instead of hoping it would soften on its own in my chilly kitchen. It went well enough, even when I had to use the double boiler to melt the white chocolate. I squeezed the icing onto the cupcakes lavishly. The amount of icing was a perfect ratio to the number of cupcakes I had, which was pleasing. The cream cheese frosting was a little overwhelming in the cream cheese tasting department, and it still didn’t quite hide the weird rubbery texture the cupcake had, but it was good nonetheless! 

But still, altogether not bad for my first attempt at proper cupcake baking.