Cupcakes

A cupcake is a small cake designed to serve one person, which may be baked in a small thin paper or aluminum cup. Just like larger cakes, icing and other cake decorations such as fruit and candy may be applied.

For a whole week, I decided to bake cupcakes for the first time and it was a struggle to find the find recipe and understand the nuances that came with the recipe. During my research, I found a ton of recipes. I tried about 5 of them and settled on one and made it mine.

So the first one I tried was a red velvet cupcake that added oil to the recipe. I followed the recipe to the “T” but someone they didn’t turn out like how it was supposed to. It had an oily surface and was very squishy. That wasn’t what I wanted. It had a great taste but it didn’t look it and it was very greasy.

The second one I did was a plain vanilla cupcake but I added food colour to differentiate because I knew I was going to be baking a lot. So this recipe called for self-rising flour which I didn’t have; but what I had was pastry flour. So I had to turn it into a self-rising flour by adding a 1 tsp of baking powder but that was a mistake. As it turns out, pastry flour is a form of self-rising flour. So adding an extra teaspoon of baking powder caused the cake to expand out of the paper cup onto the baking tray. This tasted very light and had lost a lot of its body. When it cooled, it sank and became very greasy.

The third one I did was also a vanilla cupcake but decided not to add food colour. I followed this recipe completely, didn’t alter anything. The temperature required for this cupcake was very low and the time also was short compared to other recipes. So I decided to try it and it came out dense and pale which was very disappointing because that’s not the result I was expecting.

The fourth recipe was also a vanilla cupcake that had baking soda and I decided to add food colour. So this time around, I decided to increase the temperature and also the time given. It came out looking great but the baking soda taste was so predominant, you could smell it. I couldn’t really finish one cupcake but other people seemed to enjoy it. I wanted a cupcake I could enjoy and look great.

The final recipe is what I got when I tweaked all four recipes to come up with my ultimate recipe. It came out looking great, tasted amazing and it was so light and airy.

This recipe makes 12 cupcakes.

Ingredients

150g self-rising/ pastry flour

150g room temperature butter

100g sugar

2 eggs

1tsp baking powder

2tbs buttermilk

½ tsp salt

2 tsp vanilla essence

Recipe

• Pre-heat your oven to 180C or 360F
• Line your baking tray with paper cups
• In a large bowl, sift flour, baking powder and salt and whisk to mix well
• Add sugar, eggs and butter
• Mix together for a maximum of 2 minutes
• Scrape the sides and add your buttermilk and vanilla essence
• Mix for another minute
• Scrape the sides and mix for an additional 10 seconds
• Then using a spoon or an ice cream scoop, scoop the batter into the cups
• Bake for 20-22 minutes
• Let it cool for 5 minutes, then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely

TIPS:

• It is very important for all your ingredients to come to room temperature before you start mixing.