Project Pastry Part 1 – Cupcakes

As you may know, I’ve started a little baking project with the dual purpose of improving my baking skills while also keeping me busy and moderately sane. While I have grandiose notions to tackle more delicate and tricky pastries such as croissants from scratch, due to time restraints this week I started with something simpler. Cupcakes. I made two batches, one batch of Red Velvet Cupcakes with decadent cream cheese frosting and one back of a delicious, rich vanilla cupcake with a gorgeous chocolate ganache topping. I also made a ganache/cream cheese frosting combination which came out beautifully.

Let the baking begin

Red Velvet Cupcakes
Preheat the overn to 180˚C . Cream together 80 g of butter with 150 g of caster sugar until well combined. Add 1 egg and whisk together until light and fluffy.

Butter & Sugar, pre-whisk

Whisked into submission

In a separate bowl, mix together  10 g of cocoa powder, 10 ml red food colouring and 5 ml vanilla extract until it forms a thick paste. Add 5 ml of boiling water if it doesn’t combine well.

Red cocoa paste

...add.....

...more whisking

Add 60 ml buttermilk and mix well. Sift together 150 g flour with 5 ml baking powder. Add half of the flour mix and combine well, followed by another 60 ml of buttermilk, mix well and then the rest of the flour mix. Lots of mixing going on. Very important!

Buttermilk..mix....flour...mix....repeat....mix!

Combine 2.5 ml Bicarbonate of Soda with 2.5ml salt and 7.5 ml white wine vinegar. Mix well until all the bicarb dissolves and add to batter. Mix together well for at least 5 minutes.

Hmmmmmm.....Purrrrty....

Line a standard cupcake pan with liners. Fill each cup about 2/3 full with the cupcake mix and bake for 25-30 minutes. Remove from the oven and let cool slightly before removing cupcakes from the pan. Place on a cooling rack to cool completely.

To the oven they go...

Cream cheese frosting
Mix together 300 g sifted confectioner’s sugar with 50 g of soft, unsalted butter. Incorporate well and add 125 g cream cheese. Mix until smooth and use to cover cupcakes. I usually sacrifice a single, small cupcake to make crumbs to sprinkle on top of the iced cupcakes. Beautiful.

Sadly, I have no picture of my own finished cupcakes. The Boyf arrived as I was finishing up and I forgot to take photo, so the picture below is merely an example. But I promise mine looked very similar, with a brilliant red colour. You can ask anyone. They really did look like this 🙂

Mind looked nearly almost quite exactly like these.