F-

Cupcakes are not my strong suit.

As you may know, I’m making Kelly’s wedding cake. So excited! This is why I made this blog. So I can chronicle worthwhile projects, not just “hey let’s make this!” projects. I wanted Kelly & Jason to sample the potential cake flavors, so I took my four favorite cake recipes & *tried* to reduce them to make cupcakes for test cakes.

Well. As you also may know, it’s difficult to add half an egg to a butter & sugar mixture. Or any mixture. Mom was right. Sometimes math doesn’t work. She said some recipes you can’t reduce or double because it just doesn’t work. I said, “Pshaw, Mom. Math is math. Triangle equals triangle. Proportions are proportions. Dead is dead.” Au contraire, mon frere. (Sidebar… Rah used that phrase with me and I had no idea what she was typing… I get it now).

My test cakes scored an F-.

The butter cake is too almond-y and not enough sugar. They rose, but the color is so blah & they are a little bit spongey.

The chocolate cupcakes tasted great! They rose… they have good color… the chocolate pieces melted nicely…

And I ended up with enough pretty ones to use…

But when I took one out of the wrapper… it totally fell apart.

Sad cupcake.

So something occurred. This is where chemistry (that I never took in high school) would come in handy. What could I have added that  would have made the cupcake stick together?

Now the strawberry cupcakes. The batter was sooo delicious! But they didn’t rise. This one called for pre-mixed box cake plus some other ingredients. I think maybe the pre-mixed stuff didn’t have what I needed? I don’t know. But they’re all fally inny and sad. And dense. And weird. And not tasty.

Each one made like half of a half of a cupcake. The cupcake block came away from the paper OK, but then it just kind of sat there. No spring in its step. Deflated cupcake block.

Now… the white chocolate cupcakes–I thought–would be AMAZING. The batter was faaaabulous. The batter was golden colored, which is perfectly normal for, you know, food, but I thought it would be a cleaner looking cake if I whitened it with white food coloring. Turns out you shouldn’t bake that. It’s like paint. Well, edible paint. You know that sort of caramelized sugar look that angel food cake has? That’s how my white chocolate cupcakes came out. So weird. TASTY. But weird.

I had to get out my macro lens for this. BTDubs, there’s something wrong with my macro. First, it isn’t a digital macro lens, so that means the focus feature isn’t built into the lens. I have to manually focus every photo. I’m BAD at that. Anyway. When I attach it, the display says “Lens Not Attached.” Well I tried adjusting… you know, kind of like when you have to bang the remote against your palm to get the batteries to connect? Re-starting… No go. But moving on.

Weird bubbly cupcake thing…

It WAS yummy, but you eat with your eyes too…

I can’t use these. Must start over. I’m going to have to use whole cakes. I’m not quite sure what to do about that yet. I can’t have four full sizes cakes hanging out around here… but for Kelly I will do it! That’s why I have a full team of maintenance guys. They can eat my experiments. Good plan. Good plan.

Cake Pop Flop

Have you ever checked out Bakerella? This woman is a genius. This page was my inspiration for today’s flop. So cute! Right? I figure if people are posting their stories and experiences with this recipe, I can totally do it. Well. It’s HARD. The basic idea seems simple.

1. Bake a cake according to the directions on the box, or make your own.

2. Let the cake cool completely.

3. Stick your hands in the cake and mash it up. Crumble it to smithereens.

4. Blop a can of frosting into your what-used-to-be-a-cake. (Though I recommend taking the frosting out of the can first).

5. Mix it up.

6. Form this ridiculously tasty dough/batter/stuff into balls & freeze.

7. Stick in a stick.

8. Dip in chocolate.

Not hard, right?

I had no problem with steps 1 through 7. As usual, I forgot to take pictures most of the way through this project. I need to get better at that. My goal was to make the regular spheres, plus hearts & wedding cakes to bring to the bridesmaid meeting I had that day.

See? Balls… sticks… no problem.

When I tried to make my white chocolate red, it all fell apart. Turns out…you can’t color melted white chocolate chips with ANY kind of food coloring. I tried Wilton paste; I tried the regular drops; and I tried color gel. Every single one made the white chocolate have a seizure and turn into a blob of white chocolatey and red colory goo. It’s supposed to be a nice smooth dippable liquid, but this is what I got.

I even tried melting the color in the microwave with the white chocolate chips…

Nope.

Then I figured, let’s not bother with the colors, let’s just do white hearts & cakes! No problem!

But then I melted it too long & it burned & got lumpy again.

Finally, I added some shortening & got the consistency I wanted. Only problem was I had used an entire large bag of white chocolate chips by then & I had to go get more!

Yay! Time to dip!

Except… the cake/frosting balls are too heavy and the chocolate is too thick. The stick ripped through the cake & it all got stuck in the melted chocolate.

Out of about 40 cake-pops-to-be, I had three that sort of worked a little bit.

Fear not! They did not go to waste. They are TASTY TASTY TASTY! I ended up making some regular popless cake balls for Sunday Dinner.

Turkey Face Plant

Just a quick note on this one. I was able to repair him, but this flop was so cute I couldn’t help but put it in the main entry! The turkey’s head–made out of a mini cupcake–was a bit top heavy. Without Royal Icing–which hardens–or some sort of load-bearing beam–like a toothpick–this guy couldn’t bear the weight of his own turkey brain.

Cupcake Fail

Unfortunately I couldn’t take pictures of most of the cupcake fail process because of the firy danger it posed, but I do have a few gems.

I have this cake pan… It’s actually really cool. It’s a Wilton product, and we know how I love my Wilton. It takes two cake batter recipes, and together, this doubley-cakey-cupcakey-cake pan makes one gigantic cupcake. The first time I used this cake pan, it was an epic fail. It was carrot cake. I had to do it twice. Oh well, that’s in the past. Moving on.

So this cake pan takes two cake recipes. No problem. OK. I worked my cupcakey magic & altered the box cake recipe to make it more deocrate-able. (From the Hello, Cupcake! book) It’s my theory (ha ha) that the reason for the flop was the addition of ingredients to the box cake, which *should* have fit into the cake pan.

Well it didn’t.

Here’s where the firy danger comes in.

I was happily stamping Christmas cards when I suddenly thought, “I’m not sure if I appreciate the smell coming from the kitchen right now.” Trevor bounded out of his chair and ran to the kitchen where we opened the oven and almost suffered asphyxiation due to smoke inhalation. (You see the reason for no pictures… when the oven is nearly on fire, you don’t think, “let’s document this for the blog”)! We did successfully revive the cake and save it from certain death by removing a good amount of overflowing batter from the cake pan, and the carnage was pretty tasty. Here’s some of what we scraped off the bottom of the oven (which we did *not* eat).

At the end of this fiasco, we did end up with a solid cake base:

And the top was just as good–I just forgot to take a photo. I will get better at this.

The next disaster (also not photographed…because how can you photograph the absence of something?) was a computation error resulting in not enough frosting. That was a theme this week.

The result of all these flops was a fairly to-scale model of a cupcake, complete with cupcake “paper” made out of white fondant, giant sprinkles and an Advent candle to top it off.

Christmas Cookies, first try

Oops… sad melty star… This is what happens when you don’t let your piping dry before you flood. Duly noted.

Something went horribly wrong with the tree. I think it had something to do with lumpy color paste. Note to self… get new green paste.