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 :).