Ever since I started baking more, especially cakes for other people, I've wanted to find good recipes for cakes. My fall back was always a box because it was dependable and if I haven't tried a recipe out before, I'm hesitant to sell it. And with all the baking I do, I can't just try recipe after recipe of cake from scratch. Hips don't lie ;O) But I've really wanted to conquer the yellow cake and had found a recipe awhile back on Smitten Kitchen that I figured would be awesome, since she made it. There was a birthday at work today, so I decided that if I made cupcakes, I could at least sample one, that way if they weren't good, I would not give them away and no one would know the difference because I hadn't told anyone I would be bringing them.
This was the first cake I've made with cake flour, but I figured it'd be worth buying if it meant it's going to taste like a 'real' cake! So I sifted together the dry ingredients.
And mixed up the wet ingredients...
There was a lot of liquid... and a lot of batter! She hadn't made this recipe into cupcakes before, so she guessed there would be 22-24. I definitely got 24 cupcakes, plus enough batter to make a little 6" cake as well!!
In her instructions she specifically said you needed to drop the pans a few times to get rid of the air bubbles. As I was pouring the batter into the cupcakes liners, there were definitely many bubbles, but I forgot the step of dropping them on the counter. I would wholeheartedly recommend you NOT forget this step. This is what happens if you don't (at least, I'm pretty sure that was the cause for this).
Luckily, some of them still turned out pretty!
Like my Autumn cupcake liners? I picked them up at Michael's last night for $1.99 for 75 of them. They're pretty :o)
Then I whipped up a batch of one of my favorite frostings: Chocolate Cream Cheese. It comes from the Cake Mix Doctor and is wonderful, delicious, divine, every time. Mmmmm! I could eat it by the spoonful, but lucky for me... and my thighs... I used all of it for frosting the 24 cupcakes and the 6" cake. Wanna see?
I enjoy frosting my cupcakes with my 1M tip because it does use more frosting and generally leaves me with zero leftovers. It used to make me sad that it used so much, but I've discovered it is a blessing.
The review? So far I've just had one cupcake and it was warm out of the oven. I feel like that doesn't give the best representation because generally cupcakes are served at room temperature. Regardless, I thought they were wonderful. The tops did get a little bit of crust on them and I'm not sure what caused that. In my opinion, I thought the 'crust' was good. But I'm not sure how others who are used to cupcakes without a 'crust' will respond. They were light and fluffy, like the box cakes typically are. I attribute that to using the cake flour, at least I would imagine that is the reason. I will definitely be eating more to get a good sampling of them at both room temperature and cold (since they're in the fridge due to the cream cheese frosting). But even with my one sample so far, I believe I will be using this recipe again. I'll admit it took more steps and more time than dumping a cake mix, eggs, oil, and water into the mixer and stirring them. So my tendency for when I need something fast may be to still use a box mix from time to time. But I believe that I would feel confident selling this as my yellow cake when people place orders. It's very good.
To life... full of cakes not from a box!
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