Thursday, August 23, 2007

Cupcake

I will admit, I have tried making icing from scratch, which only resulted in failure, but this time, it was different, this time, the only thing I was making from scratch was the icing, the cupcake was boxed french vanilla, three eggs, oil and water type deal. But the icing is an accomplishment because I do not own a mixer. Not even a hand mixer. Which makes the requisite creaming of butter a little bit hard.

So this time I found a boiling icing recipe, where the thickening agent is flour and milk, and although it still required some extended periods of whipping, it took considerably less effort than a butter cream recipe and also allowed me to use regular sugar instead of powdered sugar, which I did not have in the apartment and was not jazzed about the effort needed to get said ingredient. Although, even with this recipe, I still cheated a little. Let me explain with the recipe:

Ingredients
1 cup milk
4 tbsp. flour
3/4 (1 1/2 sticks) butter - cubed and at room temperature
1 cup sugar
1 tsp. vanilla

Let me make note that after I typed above ingredients out, I realized that I forgot to add the vanilla, oh well, it tastes just fine without it.

1. Heat up milk and flour in saucepan, whisking continuously to avoid flour lumps. Turn off heat when mixture thickens just the little bit. (The residual heat will thicken the mixture further, you don't want a solid mass, it should be creamy.) Allow to cool.

2. Mix butter and sugar, use a whisk and try to incorporate sugar into butter as much as possible.

3. Slowly start adding the flour mixture.
-Pause-
This is where I cheated.
I did not leave the flour to cool for very long, I put it in a shallow ceramic bowl to take off some excess heat and to stop the cooking process. But what I found out was that by adding the mixture to the butter before cooling, I actually melted my (frozen) butter enough that it whisked very well, and it also melted the sugar down so I didn't have sugar granules. Great for when you're working with butter straight from the freezer and don't have any mechanical mixers. The only downside is that it takes a little longer to make the icing because you need to put it in the fridge to get the right consistency, otherwise all you have is white slush.

4. Whisk together until fully incorporated, add vanilla and apply to the cupcakes.

Result:
Tadaaaaa!

Of course now I can't eat of the cupcakes because I'm so sick of the taste of the icing, I was testing it every few minutes while I was making it to make sure the bland flour mixture didn't overpower the sugar. I actually only used 1/2 cup of sugar, since the cupcakes were already really sweet. Strange, this icing tastes exactly like the icing my mother used to make, I haven't tasted it on any cakes in years.

1 comment:

Subliminal Transmission said...

Mmm yum yum. My sist, cake (don't know if you remember her) made this nutella muffin a while ago.. it was pretty good. But your cupcake is cuter :)