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!