Week 28 - Vanilla Cupcakes with Strawberry Filling and Chocolate Glaze

Ming’s version of the vanilla cupcake with strawberry filling and chocolate glaze looks adorable and delicious. Mine, on the other hand, I think looks more like the little bad-guy mushrooms from Super Mario. Bummer. But still pretty tasty.

This is my last cupcake to make for the club and, thankfully, things went pretty well. They went so well that I decided to get a little adventurous:  I made a double batch, and filled half with strawberry preserves and half with lemon filling (after baking). I dipped the strawberry preserve cupcakes in the chocolate glaze; I frosted the lemon-filled cupcakes with the lime frosting perfected by Abby. It’s my favorite frosting ever. The lemon filling was okay – mostly I just wanted to try out the filling attachment on my piping gun. Oh, kitchen gadgets!

The cupcake was alright. Not my favorite vanilla cupcake. I think maybe the cupcake from week 2 would’ve been better – I remember it being a little more moist.

But since this is my last cupcake, I’ve been reflecting on what I’ve learned through this experience:

1.      If in doubt, sift it out: My last few cupcakes have turned out much better than my first attempts. I think this is partly because I started sifting all my dry ingredients together. Okay, so really I just force them through my colander because I don’t have a sifter. But, Christmas is only three months away. A girl can dream.

2.      Don’t just measure twice and cut once – calculate three times, measure twice, then cut once: I learned this the hard way after thinking I’d properly doubled all my ingredients. I wasted so much time and money on that mistake (seriously – a whole box of butter wasted! That stuff’s like $3 a box.). Maybe this doesn’t apply so much for people who are good at things like fractions or adding. But it’s a must for me.

3.      There’s a reason you make 12 cupcakes: Because they’re best when they’re shared. It’s been so much fun making cupcakes with everyone in this club and seeing their cupcake creations, and I’m so lucky to have worked and shared cupcakes with all of them.

And one last thing – I’m not sure how she does it, but Ming’s fillings always look so darn perfect in the cross-section view of the cupcake. I mean, every time the filling is just perfectly in the center. Whenever I try to fill a cupcake before baking, the filling always sinks to the bottom and looks kind of sad. If anyone figures out the trick to this, please let me know!