I've learned a lot of things baking at home my entire life, but my recent baking obsession has brought me on a hunt for the perfect cupcake recipe. I feel like cupcakes are so different from cake. Cake should be dense so it can hold up to slicing and frosting. Cupcakes should be a little pouf of deliciousness, and they seem so obvious if they're not perfect.
My parent's 30th wedding anniversary was this June, and they had a huge barbecue in their backyard to celebrate. My mother asked me to make two different cupcakes for dessert. The Mom cupcake was a chili chocolate cupcake with a chocolate swiss merengue buttercream topped with a chocolate chili pepper. The Dad cupcake was vanilla with vanilla swiss merengue buttercream topped with homemade butterscotch sauce and a white chocolate heart.
The chocolate cupcake was pretty easy. My mother found this recipe for Mexican Hot Chocolate Cupcakes from the blog Gotta Get Baked. They were very airy and fluffy, which is the biggest thing I look for in a cupcake. I used Greek yogurt instead of sour cream, olive oil instead of vegetable oil, and I left out the cinnamon and chili pepper. Delicious, but they didn't rise very much. Actually, they didn't seem to rise at all. If I only filled the cupcake liner halfway I had a little midget cupcake after it baked.
The vanilla cupcake was another story. Who knew vanilla was so difficult?!?!?! I must have tried 5 different recipes from various sites on the internet. One turned out like a vanilla biscuit, and most were still too dense for me to enjoy. I discovered that one big problem was I had been refrigerating the cupcakes before frosting, and it was drying them out (I certainly wasn't about to re-make all the cupcakes to see if I tainted the recipe with refrigeration). I ultimately used this recipe The-Best-Moist-and-Fluffy-White-Cupcake from The Alchemist blog. I found them to be greasy, and I personally think the cornstarch is a little weird. They were delicious, but not perfect for me.
Ultimately, everyone enjoyed the cupcakes and they all disappeared!
How can you really be a baker if you are just stealing someone else's recipes? And why on earth am I wasting my time testing out other people's recipes when, frankly, they never seem to be exactly what I'm looking for? Time to break the mold and try to make my own recipes. Something perfect for me.
I found two sites with virtually identical information about the correct ratios for making a cake recipe. Sweet Dreams, Cupcakes! and For Great Cakes, Get The Ratios Right. They seemed like a godsend, but upon further investigation they had me raising an eyebrow.
Flour should equal sugar by weight - check
Eggs should equal butter/oil by weight - check (even though we usually don't measure either of these by weight)
Eggs and other liquids should equal the weight of the sugar - HUH???
"For Great Cakes, Get The Ratios Right" clearly says "Our recipe now has 7 ounces sugar and 3-1/2 or 3-3/4 ounces eggs. To get the total amount of liquid to weigh more than the sugar, we could add 4 ounces (1/2 cup) of a liquid, like milk or buttermilk." BUT milk and buttermilk both have different weights. This would imply that we have switched over to volume instead of weight. That would have been nice to know! It also does not show you how to add in cocoa powder and still have a good ratio.
I spent a few manic hours making two recipes: vanilla and chocolate. I figured that I could create anything I want from these two bases.
I can't wait to try out my recipes and see if they work! I have to be honest, even after writing this I am questioning some of my weights. Tomorrow I'm going to try out my vanilla!
No comments:
Post a Comment