Cupcakes: A Buttercream's Best Friend

Last week I showed you how to make the perfect buttercream.  This week, I thought I’d show you a fabulous conveyance for said frosting.  Even as good as the buttercream is, you still can’t just eat it with a spoon.  Not if there are other people present, anyway.  These cupcakes are soft and tender and I’d say they fall into the category of a sponge cake. 

Here’s what you’ll need:

• 1 cup flour
• ¾ cup sugar
• ½ teaspoon baking powder
• ½ teaspoon baking soda
• ½ teaspoon salt
• 3 eggs
• ¼ cup oil
• ¼ cup buttermilk
• 2 Tablespoons water
• 1 teaspoon vanilla

Start by preheating your oven to 350° and lining/spraying your muffin pan.  Next up, measure all of your dry ingredients into a large-ish mixing bowl. 

Whisk those together and set it aside.  Next, you need to separate the eggs.  (Seeley has the perfect tip for that here.)  If you measure all the rest of your wet ingredients first, you can just drop the yolks in with them and save dirtying an extra dish.  

Beat the egg whites until you get stiff peaks.  <giggle>  Sorry, I just can’t help myself.  But if you don’t laugh at the term ‘stiff peaks’, then you’ve never read a really bad romance novel.  Some of the descriptive phrases that people come up with are simply amazing.  I have yet to actually come across stiff peaks (HA!), but I guarantee it’s out there somewhere.  Oops, I got sidetracked.  Where was I?  Oh yes, egg whites. 

Set those aside and whisk together the other wet ingredients and pour them over the dry stuff. 

Stir until it just comes together. 

Add about ⅓ of the egg whites. 

Fold that in until it’s mostly incorporated before adding the next third. 

Stirring will deflate the egg whites, so make sure you’re gently folding them in.  Cut through the middle with your spatula.

Then scrape along the bottom of the bowl and up over the top. 

Continue that with the remaining egg whites until they’re all incorporated.  Spoon the batter into the muffin cups, filling each one about ⅔ full.  I always put my muffin tins on a sheet pan.  It makes them easier to move around, and it’s also insurance in case I’ve filled them too full.   

Now, just before you put the cupcakes into the oven turn the temperature up to 425°.  Bake them at that temperature for 5 minutes, then turn it back down to 350°.  Bake them for an additional 10 – 12 minutes. (That’s a total of 15 – 17 minutes.)  They’ll be just starting to brown around the edges and a toothpick inserted in the middle of one should come out clean.  Allow them to cool in the pan for only 2 or 3 minutes before relocating them to a cooling rack. 

When they’ve cooled completely, top each one with a generous amount of delicious buttercream. 

The interior of these cupcakes is fabulous.  They’re light, fluffy, and moist without feeling oily. 

What perfectly innocent phrase makes you crack up?  Come on, we all have our sophomoric moments. 

Pear Mayhem!

Oh, it's Mayhem alright.

I bought a bag of pears a little while ago and they are delicious and just the right size for taking to lunch for afternoon snacks, but the trouble with a whole bag of pears is that they all ripen at the same time. And then you have a bag of super-ripe pears and way more afternoon snacks than one person can eat in three days.

Fortunately, you also need something to take for breakfast. Or eat at home for breakfast. Or dessert. But really, this is more of a breakfast cake.

Cake for breakfast! Mayhem!

Oh, and once again, I'm winging it. Because, I laugh in the face of Mayhem!

It laughed back at me.

Pear Upside Down Cake

• 3-4 pears
• 1/4 cup melted butter
• 1/2 cup brown sugar

• 1/2 cup butter
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 2 eggs
• 2 tsp ground ginger
• 3/4 cup milk
• 1 1/2 cups flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 2 pears, grated

Preheat the oven to 350 and bring all the ingredients to room temperature. 

Butter and line an 8 inch square pan with parchment.

Pour the melted butter into the pan, sprinkle over the sugar, and lay in the pears. If you plan on presenting this for some kind of fancy breakfast, you could arrange the pears artfully. Me, I wanted to use as many as possible, so I crammed 4 pears into the bottom of the pan.

Cream the butter and sugar together, then add the eggs.

If you ever get eggshell in your batter, the best thing to take it out is another eggshell.

Beat in the eggs, and then the ginger and the milk.

Mix in the dry ingredients. If you'd like to sift the baking powder and baking soda into the flour first, go right ahead, but this is a quick cake, and if you just give the dry stuff a bit of a stir as it sits on top of the wet before mixing the two together, that's just fine.

If the pears you're grating in aren't super ripe and juicy, you may want to add anothe 1/4 cup of milk or pear juice. However, I recommend using ridiculously ripe pears.

Pears seem to be classed as a "hard" fruit most of the time, treated much like apples are, but a nice ripe pear is not crisp like an apple is. A perfectly ripe pear will crush in your hand the same way a peach does.

Mix in the pears and spread the batter over the sliced ones on the bottom of the pan.

Hm. That's a really full pan.

I however, am not anywhere near as smart as Taneasha, and I didn't put mine onto a baking sheet.

Instead I popped the pan in the oven and set the timer for 40 minutes.

10 minutes later, the cake started sending me smoke signals out of the vent. I opened the oven. And then I opened every window in my apartment and the front door.

The sugar at the bottom of the pan had bubbled up and overflowed onto the bottom of the oven.

I yanked the cake and put it on a sheet covered with parchment, then shoved it back into the oven.

I had to vent the smoke every few minutes for the next 15 minutes, but eventually it cleared.

I've been thinking for a while that I should clean the oven. I guess I really have to now.

Um, okay, apparently rising was not an issue this time.

Crap, I'm supposed to flip this thing upside down to let the pears out.

A bread knife, horizontal, and that wacky peak is taken care of. This trick works well for levelling out the bottom half of a layer cake too.

And since I don't have a square plate, or a round platter big enough for this thing, and since I need something to store it in, I flipped it into my 9 inch square Corningware pan.

Nailed it.

I'll just trim the edge off to make it fit.

The taste of this is just fabulous. I know there's nothing in there but ginger, but that's the point. The ginger gives the soft cake a nice bite that perfectly offsets the smooth pear.

And the caramel! Holy cow.

I think next time I may add a bit of ginger to the sugar-butter mixture that makes up the caramel.

What would you add ginger to?