Now THAT is a cupcake!

One of my traits, you decide if it's bad or good, is that I don't like to waste things. I've gotten into trouble with this in the baking and decorating arena. A basic cake and frosting recipe usually provides enough frosting to simply fill and ice the cake, but not much more than that. So in all these decorating endeavors, I've made a lot of extra frosting. I get into these cycles, of extra frosting, necessitating more baking, necessitating more frosting, etc. It is always a feat when I have no extra of anything laying around.

Recently I had some leftover lemon icing, white chocolate ganache, and cream cheese frosting. I also had a potentially awesome cupcake recipe to try. Thomas Keller has some really delicious stuff in his book Ad Hoc, including some very decadent looking cupcakes. I thought this would be a great opportunity to use up my frosting and test it out. It is just a simple yellow cupcake recipe, but with lots of butter and also lots of egg whites, so the result is both rich and fluffy. When I ate one plain, sans random icing, the words out of my mouth were "Now THAT is a cupcake!". Very delicious, moist, and fluffy, I'm going to have to use this as by basic yellow cake for other stuff.

Here's a photo of the montage of cupcake flavors that resulted. Yellow cupcakes with lemon, yellow will lemon filled with white chocolate, yellow with cream cheese, etc.
The frosting/filling combos were not all winners, lemon on simple yellow cake was nice, but boy, that is a good cake recipe! Fortunatley or unfortunatley, again I'll let you decide, the recipe made about a bazillion cupcakes, so I baked 12 to use up my leftovers and made the rest of the batter into 2 6 inch rounds which are now in the freezer. We'll see what comes up to use up those :).

Azerbaijani Freedom Cupcakes

Our good friend A is headed off to Azerbaijan to teach for a couple of years, so we took the opportunity to gather our church small group friends for a send off BBQ. The date that worked out best was the 4th of July. What a perfect date to celebrate the send off from the US to an international adventure.

It was also a good excuse to make a festive cake. Although, baking for A introduced a challenge: gluten free. First of all, I really wanted to do an ice cream cake, cause A LOVES ice cream, but I had no idea how to make that work at a super hot outdoor BBQ. So I settled on cupcakes, for ease of eating at a park. I wanted to make something Azerbaijan themed, so I got inspired by the Azerbaijani flag. I thought I could do a simple design with 3 rows of cupcakes in the corresponding colors with a fondant cutout to make the moon and star.

Sounds simple enough, but I needed to get this gluten free thing figured out. I read about different gluten free recipies, most of them needing tapioca flour, coconut flour, almond flour, or lots of other interesting flours I haven't worked with. I was very interested in playing around with this new stuff, but I was running short on time for the BBQ, and I didn't want to bring a pile of mush to the party if the cupcakes failed. So I settled on an all natural cupcake mix from Cherrybrook Kitchen.
I went ahead and bought the gluten free icing made by them also, because the gluten free recipes called for gluten free vanilla. I didn't think I'd use much of it, so I decided not to buy a bottle. Little did I know that the vanilla I had at home was gluten free, so I could have made it myself, but oh well.

The cupcakes turned out very nice, moist and delicious, but the icing was very soft and would not hold it's shape. I just wanted to pipe them on the cupcakes with a simple star tip, but even after beating in extra powdered sugar, that wouldn't hold. I figured even if the cupcakes didn't look perfect, the color of the icing and the fondant cut outs would still get the message across.

So here's what we ended up with! Azerbaijani Freedom Cupcakes = Gluten free, wheat free, dairy free, nut free, everything free really :) A enjoyed her gluten free goodness, as did everyone else!