I felt like making cupcakes today. Since yellow cake is the base of a lot of cupcakes, I figured I'd begin my search for a good yellow cake recipe. The last time I tried a yellow cake, it came out really dense, so I was on the hunt for a lighter, fluffier recipe. Handy dandy Google pointed me to this one-bowl yellow cake recipe, which looked pretty moist, although it's sometimes hard to tell with pictures. It also had the benefit of being prepared in, as the name says, one bowl. I do love simplicity. Furthermore, its ingredient list was pretty basic, calling only for things that I already had on hand. I was sold.
Yellow cake is kind of boring though. It just seemed like such a plain thing, so I wanted to spice it up a little. Having never made confetti cake before, I didn't want to be that girl who's never made confetti cake, so I decided that color would be my chosen form of spicing up. Also, since the happy flecks of color don't interfere too much with the taste and consistency of a cake, I'd still be able to see if this recipe would be right for me.
Did you know that the specks of color in confetti cake are created by sprinkles mixed into the batter? I didn't. I only found that out yesterday when I looked up confetti cake on a whim. Whenever I ate a confetti cupcake that a friend or classmate brought to school, I never really thought about where the color came from. Now I know.
I made a slight adjustment to the original recipe. It calls for 1 and 1/4 cups of sugar, but since sprinkles are basically sugar, I substituted a quarter cup of sprinkles for that quarter cup of sugar. In the end, the cupcakes were still too sweet for my liking, so next time around, I'm going to try cutting some sugar. Aside from that, the cake was pretty good. It was airy and soft. I think it could be a tad more moist, so I think I'll play around with that next time as well, but it's no big deal. I may just be doing the excessively picky thing.
This cake's color is quite lovely. It's a nice, creamy, mellow yellow, which I much prefer to the blaring sunshine yellow of some other cakes.
Ingredients: Makes about 20 cupcakes
2 cups all purpose flour, sifted
1 cup sugar
1 Tbsp. baking powder
1 tsp. salt
1/2 cup (1 stick) butter, softened
1 cup milk
1 tsp. vanilla extract
2 eggs
1/4 cup sprinkles
Directions: Preheat your oven to 350 F. Sift the flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt into a large mixing bowl. I don't know how essential sifting is, but in something delicate like cake, I'd imaging you want all the lumps out. I'm really not sure how much some lumps affect the cake consistency or if they do at all, and usually when I sift, I don't find any particularly large lumps. But I sift anyway because it's kind of fun.
I actually got a pretty substantial chunk of sugar
Add the butter into the bowl and whisk it until it mixes with the dry ingredients and turns kind of crumbly. I hate whisking butter...it gets all stuck inside the whisk, but by the end of the process, it should be in small enough pieces to not get stuck. Add the milk and vanilla extract and continue whisking/mixing for another minute or two. Add the eggs and then whisk yet another minute or two. Alternatively, this whole thing can be done with an electric mixer, the way it's described on the original recipe, but I don't have one. Finally, stir in the sprinkles.
Color!
Spoon the batter into the wells of a lined (or unlined) muffin tin, filling them about 2/3 of the way. Normally I don't line my muffins or cupcakes with liners because I think they're kind of a waste, but I felt like making super cupcake-looking cupcakes, so I used liners this time. Sometimes you have to grease the liners because they'll cling to your cupcakes and take off an obscene amount of cake when you try to remove them, but I found that they didn't stick at all with this recipe--no greasing necessary. I'm not sure if this is the case without the liners, and I'd grease the pan just to be safe.
Something like 2/3 full
Every so often, I say to myself, "Wow, I haven't made cupcakes or muffins in a while. I should make some." And then after I start making them, I remember why. I hate spooning batter into wells. It's such a messy and/or time-consuming process. I talked to my mom yesterday, who was watching a show on cupcakes, and she said the bakers used ice cream scoops to put the batter into the wells. Maybe I should invest in an ice cream scoop, which might also help regulate the size of my cupcakes. They're always all sorts of different sizes because I can't seem to spoon the same amount into each well.
Bake cupcakes for 15 minutes, give or take, until a toothpick inserted into a test cupcake comes out clean. Because I don't have toothpicks, I use an uncoated wooden chopstick, which leaves a really unsightly hole in whatever I bake, but at least I'm not constantly throwing out those sharp little spears of wood. Luckily, cupcakes have frosting to cover up the hole. After removing from the oven, let the pan cool for about five minutes, and then relocate the cupcakes to a cooling rack. I've been living without a cooling rack for a while, and usually I just leave whatever I'm cooling on the vent of the (off) heater or on the racks of the (off) stove top. I discovered today that a sushi roller on top of a large bowl and a basket steamer make for really good substitute cooling racks. A removed oven rack apparently works for some people as well, but the gratings are too large in mine, and stuff just falls through instead of sitting on top of it. As you'll notice, my life in college is very much about living without certain kitchen-y, and other, things. (I say that, yet I randomly have some really specialized things, like a candy thermometer...and immersion blender.)
My fantastic cooling rig
After the cupcakes are completely cool, frost with whatever frosting you like. I used the cream cheese frosting provided with the cake recipe, with a tad extra sugar to smooth out the tang of the cream cheese. If you like your frosting quite sweet, you should probably add even more sugar.
Ingredients: Makes frosting for about 20 cupcakes, unless you like an extremely generous amount of frosting or barely any at all, in which case...adjust for your taste.
8 oz cream cheese, room temperature
1/2 cup (1 stick) butter, room temperature
1-1/2 cup powdered sugar
Directions: Using a spatula, wooden spoon, or other similar device, smash cream cheese and butter into a smooth paste. Switch to a whisk and add powdered sugar very gradually, whisking in between each addition. Seriously, gradually. I added the sugar about a tablespoon at a time. While it's a really slow process, it helps your frosting come out smooth rather than clumpy. If you're using an electric mixer, lucky you--you probably can add the sugar in larger quantities.
Frost with whatever you want to frost. I was thinking about practicing my nonexistent piping abilities, but after thinking about it, cleaning up the piping bag seemed like too much work. I opted to frost with a knife instead, which worked out fine since I actually prefer the way hand-frosted cupcakes look. I think the next kitchen tool on my list is a flexible cake spatula. I use my mom's pharmaceutical something spatula at home, which is an excellent frosting tool, but it's at home, and I think it belongs there. Alas, I guess I must get my own. Or maybe not since I don't often make cakes or cupcakes. Then again, that could change in the near future.
I wish I owned more than one plate
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