Cookies & cream cupcakes (+ education on shortening)

I got rather excited when I saw Bakerella's recent Cookies and Cream Cupcakes post and I had a baby shower to attend today which seemed like an excellent occasion to bake these for.

My husband insisted that there is no substitute for a real Oreo, so I used the genuine article this time around (a whole 300g box of them in fact!), but I believe that this would work just as well with cheaper supermarket brand biscuits. I'll report back once I've tried this myself. And believe me, these cakes are worth making more than once.

I took Bakerella's advice and made cakes both with broken and whole cookies as the starting point.

I actually got 12 large (ie. muffin-sized) cupcakes and 18 mini cupcakes out of one batch of this recipe.

I like to make a combination of large and small cupcakes for the following reasons:

1. Our gas oven heats unevenly, with the top shelf hotter than the bottom, so it actually works out quite well if I have smaller cakes on the bottom. They're usually ready at about the same time as the larger cakes on the top shelf.
2. A lot of people seem extremely daunted by a muffin sized cupcake with a big swirl of icing on the top. My friend Karen calls the mini cupcakes the "low fat version." They're also a more child-friendly size.
3. If I only make a dozen cupcakes I don't have anything to leave at home for my husband, who endures much mess in the kitchen for my sake. Having little "spare" cakes also means that I can taste test them before feeding them to friends and family.

Anyway, these cupcakes are super easy to make. No need for an electric mixer! They contain vegetable oil rather than butter so the batter is very runny, and the cakes come out lovely and moist. A note of WARNING though: test the cakes with a skewer to check if they're cooked rather than just judging by sight. They have a really glossy finish which is a bit deceiving (but also attractive).

Bakerella made her icing with shortening, which I've been meaning to try out myself (it's supposed to make your icing firmer and whiter, rather than off-white). I wasn't concerned about getting my icing really white, so I used a buttercream recipe from my friend Kara, who lives in the US, which uses a combination of butter and shortening. This is double the original recipe that she gave me. I only used 1 teaspoon of Vanilla Essence - I find that too much can be overwhelming/sickly sweet.

Kara's Buttercream Recipe

• 120g butter, softened (but not melted)
• 250g shortening (Crisco)***
• 4 cups icing sugar (add in a little at a time, especially for large batches)
• 6 tablespoons milk
• 2 tsp vanilla (real, not imitation)
• 2 pinches of salt (optional - if using salted butter use less or no salt)

1. Cream together shortening*** and butter.
2. Add other ingredients and mix until creamy.
3. Mix in food colouring if desired (or, in this case, cookie crumbs).

***MY NEWEST DISCOVERY

Australian "Copha" is NOT the same as American "shortening," despite the fact that the packet says "Vegetable Shortening." I softened my butter - all good. Then I got my Copha out of the fridge - it was rock solid. Neither Bakerella nor Kara said anything about softening the shortening, but I assumed that it couldn't just go straight into my mixer like that, so I microwaved it a little. It barely softened. So I decided to chop it up into pieces. It seemed to crumble a little when I cut into it, so I thought that maybe the mixer would be able to do this on a larger scale with the now smaller, more manageable pieces of this strange substance.

Well. The Copha was quickly coated in butter but it took ages, and a lot of hard work from the MixMaster to get it anywhere near an icing consistency. I was running late so I didn't stop to look it up and find out why. My icing ended up OK, but it was really thick and thus took a lot of effort to pipe out onto the cakes. This wasn't helped by the cookie crumbs which at one point blocked the tip up completely (I had not broken them down very finely), but we can't blame the Copha for that one.

My poor MixMaster would really not appreciate another battle like the one it had with that block of Copha, so when I got home from the party I thought I should really find out more about this Copha vs. shortening thing. As it turns out, American "shortening" or Crisco (brand name) is approximately the consistency of... margarine. NOT rock. MixMaster, I'm sorry. My scanning of a few forums suggests that Australian "Fairy Margarine" might be a suitable substitute for shortening. But not copha (although one person did suggest you could try melting it down and just beat it in like that).

The thickness of the icing and the occasional clogging of cookie crumbs in my icing tip meant that some of my decorating was less than beautiful, but the great thing about these cakes is that you can cover up any icing flaws with cookie pieces. I didn't have enough cookies left from my 300g Oreo packet to stick a whole one on top of each cake, but I quite like the rustic look of broken cookie pieces and crumbs anyway.

I will definitely be making these again. But not using copha!

Honey cupcakes with honey & cinnamon buttercream

I found a recipe for honey cupcakes on Oprah's website. I wouldn't have thought to look there for recipes but this one came up in a search and she got it from a White House pastry chef, so I thought it was worth a try. Which is somewhat ironic because I don't like honey by itself, but it's OK in tea, so I thought I'd give it a go in cake.

I got out my scales again to continue my cupcake weight experiment (OCD?). I made a few 25 gram mini cupcakes and they came out just the right size. Full, but not rising over the top :)

I also made 12 muffin-size cakes and tried them with slightly different weights - a row of 55g (far left), row of 60g, row of 65g and row of 70 grams (far right). As you can see none of them rose over the top, which was my main objective. The 55g cakes looks a little scant, but if you're going to be piping icing on top of them anyway I don't think it really matters - you'd still be getting quite a mouthful of cake if you got one of those!

Oprah's chef proposed a simple frosting of icing sugar, honey and lemon juice, which probably would have been fine. But I wanted something that I could pipe! So I decided to try a honey cinnamon buttercream which I found on Loves To Eat (...I remember the days when I could still afford bananas for baking...*sigh*). I'm a die-hard cinnamon fan so it seemed like a decent idea.

A word of advice: taste your icing before you pipe it all over your cakes. If I'd done this I think I would've added some more cinnamon... it just seems to be lacking something. Which makes me think that Oprah's version with the lemon juice might have been just right - a bit of a citrus kick. Next time.

I probably did too many of my beloved rosette swirls, but they're just so pretty. Also I was lazy and only used one tip - the smaller 22 star. As expected it looked a little small on the larger cakes.

I got a bit carried away with some of them, but I quite like how this one came out.

Overall I wasn't hugely impressed by the honey cake, but like I said, I'm not really a honey fan to begin with. They're not bad.

The cupcake army advances.

More of the same - mini vanilla cupcakes with rosewater buttercream

I had a half batch of rosewater buttercream frosting left over in the fridge so thought I'd try Little Betsy Baker's Vanilla Cupcake Recipe again to make mini cupcakes and spend more time playing with my new icing set (mainly star tip 22).

I guess this is obvious, but I was reading the other day on someone's blog that they weigh their cupcakes to get them all exactly the same size. So I had a go at that, but didn't know how much to actually aim for! My tray takes 24 small cupcakes and I initially put 30 grams into each case, but then had a little left over which I shared out amongst them... so I suppose they were more like 32g. And that was slightly too much. They spread out and stuck together, so next time I won't try to squeeze it all into the one pan - lesson learned.

And then I set to work on the actual decorating, which is good fun. I wanted to experiment a little bit so ended up with a varied assortment of little cakes.

As this was the same icing batch from the other day I mostly just had the pale pink colour, but I did keep a little bit without colouring (the occasional pale yellow detail that you can see). I don't mind the pastel shades, but brighter colours would be better for contrast, and I think you really need the icing to be a bit harder if you're going to be piping on top of a base layer.

I like the rosette shape (below centre) better than the traditional swirl (probably because I can't get my swirls very neat just yet).

Vanilla cupcakes with rosewater buttercream icing swirls - success!

The first time I attempted to ice cupcakes with "swirls" I used the wrong kind of icing (a soft cream cheese) and the wrong kind of icing tip (straight and not very wide). So I ended up with a random selection of squiggles and shapes, which were fine (and delicious), but not what I was aiming for.

A little reading suggested that I would do much better with a Wilton 1M star tip and a buttercream icing recipe. So my first step was to go out and buy a Wilton 12-Piece Cupcake Decorating Set (for the princely sum of around $20), still a little dubious about the difference a special tip could make.

I had my vanilla cupcakes ready to go (my first time making these using a recipe from Little Betsy Baker) and I thought they might go nicely with Cupcake Gal's buttercream frosting, using rosewater essence instead of vanilla, and just a tiny bit of red food colouring to get a pretty pale pink. It came out looking like gloriously fluffy pink clouds.

Then I set about the task of actually creating my swirls. And might I just say - the 1M star tip is fantastic! I was very pleasantly surprised at how quick and easy it was to decorate each cake. They still look a little clumsy (I positioned the messiest ones furthest from the camera), but overall I was very happy with the results.

They also tasted really good! I think the vanilla cupcake recipe is a keeper - a nice standard flavour to dress up. The buttercream icing itself was a little softer than I would've liked, so I'll have to work on that. Very sweet too, which should maybe be toned down (depending on taste). I'd suggest using just 1 teaspoon of rosewater essence, or maybe even just 1/2 a teaspoon and see how it tastes.

Progress

Mixmaster acquired - check.

Vanilla cupcakes baked and ready for decorating in the morning - check.

Not a bad day.

Welcome to Cakie's Home Baking!

After a few years dabbling in baking I've finally decided to blog about it, inspired by the likes of Bakerella and Smitten Kitchen. Alas, my photography is not nearly as grand as theirs, nor am I likely to be as original, but I do enjoy baking - the process, the products, and sharing food with friends and family :)

As a general rule I prefer to bake simple things. I'm particularly keen on recipes that use ingredients I already have in the cupboard, or that just require one or two special ingredients on top of my basics. But I'm not averse to trying something new, especially for an occasion.

I prefer to avoid using an electric mixer (extra washing up!), but I'm finding that the more I branch out the more helpful it is to use one. Which means I should probably get one. I'm currently alternating between a food processor (works OK for some things) and a cheap hand blender (tends not to get enough air into batter/icing and heats up way too quickly).

I have no experience with fondant icing and I'm not particularly drawn to learning. For now I'm trying to work out buttercream icing swirls for cupcakes. Yum.

Last but not least, I'm in Australia. So there may be a slight translational gap if you aren't. Eg. icing sugar is the Australian equivalent of confectioner's sugar, I use a combination of metric measures and grams, and my oven uses Celsius rather than Fahrenheit.

Questions and comments are welcome. I look forward to sharing my failures and successes with you (even the failures tend to taste OK :).