Cupcakes for Dummies (St Patrick's Day Rainbow Cupcakes, Topped with Lucky Charms)

The cupcakes I've made in the past never tasted as good as the ones at the specialty shops (like Sprinkles Cupcakes).   I've tried different recipes and none of them were great.  Then it got me thinking, maybe its not the recipe but the technique.  I googled and googled and finally found a few tips on making better cupcakes that has helped me tremendously.  These tips may seem obvious to some, but for me it was a switch went off and my cupcakes were instantly better.

Tip 1:  Your butter does not need to be at room temperature if you are using a electric beater. You want your butter to be a little cooler than room temperature so it does not become a greasy mess when you fluff your butter and sugar.  Your eggs should be at room temperature.

Tip 2: Fluff your butter and sugar.  I mean really fluff it, do not skimp on this step!

Tip 3: Sift your flour and then measure it.  I know this one I rarely did and when I did sift, I would measure then sift, which is the wrong order!  You will see in the image below how much left over flour I had after I measured 3 cups, sifted, and remeasured three cups.  Three cups of unsifted flour was more like 2.75 cups of sifted flour.  (I read the best measurement is by weight, but I haven't gotten that advanced yet).

The more obvious tips:

Tip 4: Mix wet ingredients and then dry.

Tip 5: Don't over mix dry ingredients into wet.

Tip 6:  Use cake flour

Tip 7:  You are baking, be precise.

Here is the recipe that I used for my cupcakes.  It's actually the recipe printed on the Swan's Down Cake Flour Box.  Since I made cupcakes, I did adjust the time from 25-30 min to 15-20 min.

Swan's Down 1-2-3-4 Cake 

1 cup butter 
2 cups sugar 
3 cups sifted Swans Down Cake Flour, sifted 
3 teaspoons baking powder
4 eggs (room temperature)
1/2 teaspoon salt 
1 cup milk 
1 teaspoon vanilla 
1/2 teaspoon almond extract 


Preheat oven to 350°F. Line cupcake trays.  Recipe makes 24 cupcakes.

In a mixing bowl cream butter and gradually add sugar, creaming until light and fluffy. Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. In another bowl sift flour (remember this is the second sift, the first sift was before you measure the flour) with baking powder and salt. Add flour mixture alternately with milk and flavorings to creamed mixture, beating after each addition until smooth. Pour batter into cake pans. 

For cupcakes bake for 15 - 20 minutes.  Cool in pans 10 minutes. Remove from pans and finish cooling on racks. 

To make rainbow cupcakes simply divide the batter into ziplock bags or bowls and mix in food coloring.  Scoop each cupcake with a little of every color.

Buttercream frosting recipe here:

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/gale-gand/quick-vanilla-buttercream-frosting-recipe/index.html

Rainbow Cupcakes topped with a Lucky Charm

Remember to sift flour!

This is how much flour that was left over after I sifted.

Cream butter and sugar well!

To make rainbow cupcakes I colored each portion of the batter in ziplock bags so I could pipe it into the cupcake tray.

Batter in tray, I didn't want to over mix my batter so the food coloring weren't completely mixed in.

Inside a rainbow cupcake.

I Got a Cake Pops Machine for Christmas

I have to admit that I'm usually not a fan of machines for cooking.  I just don't like kitchen gadgets that serve one purpose (ie make one thng).  Like waffle makers,"Big City Slider" pans, corn stripper, juicers, electric can openers etc.  Maybe its the engineer in me, I always want the most efficient, compact, multipurpose tool for the job.  It still boggles me why a company can't make a decent food processor/blender combo.  There are those machines out there, but when you read the reviews on them people are always complaining that it does one task poorly or worse, both task mediocrely.  Maybe if I had a grand kitchen I would feel differently, but for now space is limited and I try not to have too many space hogging kitchen gizmos around.

When I received this Babycakes Cake Pop maker, I was thinking great, I will spend two days using it, 10 years in the pantry, 1 day at a yard sale and a thousand years in a landfill.  But then my sister knocked on our door and dropped off some homemade Christmas cookies.  I was so unprepared to give her anything in return I looked at the cake pop maker and decided to see what this thing was made of.  I used Duncan Hines Yellow cake mix (all I had on hand). I always substitute the water with whole milk when I use cake mix (which incidentally that's what people recommend you do for this machine). I filled up the mix in a ziploc, snipped the corner and filled the liitle domes.  It was surprisingly easy and not that messy.  The instructions said not to overfill the domes, but I did so anyway because I was thinking that there was no way that the dough would rise to double in size to make a ball.  Boy was I wrong. You can see the images below of what happens when you over fill the domes.

This little machine actually did impress me.  It created perfect little spheres in less than 5 minutes.  They tasted just OK (like how box cake mix tastes).  I would say that the best thing about it is the speed at which you can make a bunch of these balls.  The machine also came with a syrninge so you can inject filling.  I happend to have a box of the Ferrero Rocher chocolates so I decided to do something creative with the packaging.  One of my sister's favorite chocolate is Ferrero Rocher, so I decided to fill the pops with Nutella and dip them in white chocolate.  I could have dipped rolled it in hazelnuts too but I didn't have any on hand.  I removed all of the packaging from the original box of chocolates and put the cake balls in instead.

Finished cake balls (can't call them pops)

The left is what happens when you over fill.  The right was my attempt.

I could eat Nutella with a spoon straight from the can.

Chocolates with the packaging removed

Filled with Nutella and dipped in white chocolate.  For a tutorial on how to dip anything into chocolate go here.

I used my salt dough gift tag for this.

A few tips on using this machine:
Do not overfill
The instructions say to turn on the machine and then fill the domes.  This never worked for me.  It was easier to plug in the machine only after the domes were filled.  Or else the pops would start cooking and overflowing over before half the domes were filled.

The cake mix makes over 5 dozen cake pops.  All in all the machine is pretty cool.  It could be useful for parents that need to bake their kids treats for a class party, since its fast.  I also made donut-holes with it a few days later.  Those tasted wonderful.  Stay tuned for that recipe.


I feel like I need to write this part: I was not paid or compensated to write this article, this machine was actually given to me by a friend that has no relationship to the manufacturer of this machine.  The opinions are completely my own.