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Monday, March 3, 2008

The quest continues!

With all of this cupcake making, every recipe I had used for plain ol' vanilla cupcakes just seemed to be missing something. Either it was too dry, too light, too heavy, shrank in the tins, or didn't taste outstanding. None of them were bad but none of them were outstanding either. So the quest continued... until..I think.. yesterday.
I came across these cupcakes (not the frosting) on Martha Stewart's website. These cupcakes are supposed to be the recipe that Billy of Billy's Bakery of NYC uses. I scaled down the recipe using this online recipe conversion tool (which is very cool, by the way) since I had never tried it before. Next time, I'll probably make a larger batch - these were good. We resisted the temptation to eat them the first day, since almost all cupcakes taste better the next day, and they were great. Not light, not heavy - a perfect substantial weight. Buttery, moist, stable... and delicious.

For the frosting, I saw this instructional video on YouTube from Culinary Institute of America. I wanted to try to frost cupcakes a little differently, and was drawn in by how easy it looked to make this Begonia-like frosting. To ensure it would come out right, I used their recipe for frosting as well. I wanted to use purple and white, as the woman in the video shows it looking quite cute when you use white as well as a pastel color to make it look variegated like a real flower... but since I didn't use clear extract, it was more brown than white. So I decided to go whacky and make these orange and purple flowers. When I tried making the flowers, the consistency of my frosting was very very different from the instructor's. Mine was much less light and fluffy, and much moister and definitely did not hold up enough to come out looking like those flowers. Instead, I just changed tips and went back to my regular star-tip way of frosting. To my surprise, they still came out kinda cute looking. And the frosting... was great. Unlike the other frosting recipes I've used, this one was not overly sweet. It was much more mild in the sugariness department. I'd use this recipe again!

Here were my results:

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I'd still like to try to make those flowery cupcakes. Anyone know of a good light fluffy frosting recipe that would make this possible?

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