Baking kind of turns me off. I don’t think I’m enough of a perfectionist to be a baker. As Ms. Abigail Johnson Dodge points out in her book The Weekend Baker, there are lots and lots and lots of finicky rules that “must” be followed. For example, did you know that measuring a dry ingredient, such as flour, with a measuring cup doesn’t actually work? In order to be exactly accurate, you must weigh the ingredients. If you must use a measuring cup, you should never dare dip your measuring cup into the bag of flour. You should always scoop the flour into the measuring cup with a… I don’t know…a special spoon…and then level it off with a knife. And this will only be somewhat accurate if you are using plain stainless steel measuring cups.
Jeez. Talk about intimidation. I don’t have a kitchen scale, nor do I intend on buying one. I don’t have stainless steel measuring cups; I have perfectly good little yellow ones (though I don’t know what they’re made out of). But in the spirit of this blog, I wasn’t going to let that stop me. That, and I was using cake mix from a box.
The Recipe
Chocolate Cupcakes- The recipe for the cupcakes themselves can be found on the back of the Pillsbury “Devil’s Food” cake box. Give me a break- it was a Wednesday night.
Vanilla Icing- This recipe was hidden in a post from Bakerella on Bourbon Sweet Potato Cupcakes. Yum. (Scroll down almost to the bottom of this link for the recipe.)
Apprehension Meter
The meter was reading at a medium-high to high earlier in the day at work, when I was feeling overly ambitious and was considering making homemade fondant to top my cupcakes. The cupcakes didn’t scare me (considering they’re from a box…), but the idea of making fondant really made me nervous. Fondant has a reputation for looking so pretty and perfect draped over cakes and placed neatly onto cupcakes, but that means a greater risk of completely screwing it up.
The meter sank back down to a medium-low once I admitted to myself that a Wednesday night was no time to take on such an endeavor. Vanilla glaze it would be.
Here’s How It Really Went
The boxed cupcakes, well, you know how those go. But the vanilla glaze? So easy! With only four ingredients that basically all get mixed together at once (aside from the milk), it has to be.
A small mountain of Pillsbury chocolate cake mix
Baking the cupcakes took a little longer than I had initially planned. The box made 24 cupcakes, with each batch taking about 18 minutes to bake. I only had one muffin tin, so the baking alone took almost 40 minutes, not factoring in the time to mix together all of the ingredients.
YUM
Feel free to lick everything covered in chocolate when you're done.
After combining the dry and wet ingredients and mixing on medium speed, I dollop-ed ice cream scoop-sized dollops into the lined muffin tin. Using an ice cream scooper sans the little clicky handle thing kind of defeats the purpose of using one, I discovered, but at least you get uniform amounts of batter in each muffin cup.
Once each cup was filled 2/3 of the way with batter, I smoothed each of them down with the backside of a spoon, to hopefully eliminate any weird bumps or abnormalities as they baked.
Crucial information! Never, ever, under any circumstances, open the oven door once your cakes are in there. I learned from Ms. Dodge’s book that opening the oven door can lower the oven temperature up to 50˚! She says that if you must check, check toward the very end of the baking time. This was especially tough for me, as my oven doesn’t have a window to spy through. It’s an exercise in self-restraint.
My goal was smooth cupcakes.
And they turned out… smooth enough.
While letting the little cakes cool, I started to whip up the glaze. The first three ingredients went in all at once, with the milk being added little by little. One thing Bakerella didn’t specify was how to “mix” the ingredients. Did this mean use a hand-held mixer? A whisk? A fork? I wasn’t sure, so I went with a fork, and it was perfect. A whisk would probably also get the job done.
Looking at the two cups of confectioner’s sugar sitting in the bowl, I certainly thought I’d be adding more than four tablespoons of milk to make this stuff turn into a glaze. But you know, four tablespoons turned out to be perfect. A little goes a long way, in this case.
Then came time for the dipping. I transferred the glaze into a smaller, deeper bowl in order to be able to fully submerse the tops of the cupcakes. (Don’t feel bad if you drop one or more cupcake(s) into the bowl- I did.)
One coat created a somewhat see-through glaze. It was kind of neat looking, but I wanted a little fuller coverage. I waited about ten minutes for the first coat to dry a little, then re-dipped. Two coats seemed to do the trick.
One coat
Two lovely, drippy coats
What’s great about these cupcakes and especially the glaze, is that non-professional, non-perfectionist, non-bakers can bake these, and they come out looking, well, imperfect. Just the way they should.
The icing dripping down the sides of the muffin cup, and the bizarre topography of the cupcake top showing through the glaze make them look homemade, and therefore, delicious.
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