Cupcake chaos...

I'm not someone who cooks.  Generally, I prefer to leave food preparation to the professionals, thus explaining my rather impressive collection of take away menus, but lately I've found myself wanting to bake for some strange reason.

And not just bake any old thing, bake cupcakes.

I have no idea why.  It's not like me at all!  Usually if I wanted a cupcake, I'd go the bakery and buy a damned cupcake!  None of this faffing around in the kitchen, creaming butter and sugar.  And who, exactly, came up with the idea of creaming butter and sugar together?  Whoever they were, they must have been sadists!  As someone who doesn't own a food processor, that's one of the hardest things to do with a hand held electric mixer.

Whether it makes me a masochist I have no idea, but I ended up pulling out my old recipe book and finding the pages for butter cake, johnny cake, chocolate mud cake.  Pulling out all the baking "extras" like chocolate chips and chopped nuts from the back of the pantry.  Digging the icing pipe out from the cutlery drawer.

My first attempt was with the traditional vanilla butter cake recipe.  Yeah ... that one didn't turn out so good.  I'm not sure how, but what came out of the oven was more like little doughy rocks than cakes.  I didn't even bother with icing them, it would have been a waste of good sugar.

Then I tried a "Four Minute Chocolate Cake" recipe.  It wasn't strictly a cupcake recipe, but I figured that didn't matter.  Surely cake is cake, no matter what shape it's in.  It's selling point was the fact that you were supposed to just dump all the ingredients in together, no blending, creaming or folding required.  Sounded right up my alley!

But when they were done the results were strange to say the least.  They hadn't risen very much, at least not as much as the vanilla butter ones, and they were almost crystallised.  I'm going to go out on a limb here and just assume that just because the recipe says it's a one step process, doesn't necessarily mean it SHOULD be.


My third attempt, red velvet cupcakes, was much better though.  They rose beautifully, looked exactly the way they were supposed to, and tasted great.  I waited until they cooled and then iced them with a cream cheese icing and teensy little candy hearts.  They were perfect, just what I wanted.

Shame that, strictly speaking, White Wings made them and not me.

Yeah, I caved and bought a cake mix.  What can I say, I got sick of failure!  Sure it'd be nice to be able to present a tray of immaculately iced cupcakes and say "Made 'em with my own two hands", but I think I'm going to have to just accept the fact that no matter how hard I try, a $2.99 cake mix is going to still yield better results.

I guess my dreams of escaping the office life and opening a cupcake cafe were a bit premature.  Oh well, back to the drawing board.