Adventures in Baking

In all the cooking that I had done in my apartment, I very rarely ever baked. And when I did, it was something straight from a box. I have seen and tasted WONDERFUL homemade things, so I decided I wanted to try my hand at making something from scratch.I used my February visit to Norman as an excuse to bake some homemade cupcakes to take to my friends while I was visiting them.

I asked one friend in particular if he preferred vanilla or chocolate cupcakes, and then hunted the internet for a fairly easy vanilla cupcake recipe.

Here are the cupcakes before they were iced:

Recipe (taken from here):

Yields 12-16 cupcakes

Ingredients

-3/4  cup butter (not margarine)

-3 eggs

-2 1/2 cups all purpose flour

-1/2 teaspoon salt

-1 3/4 cups sugar

-3 Tablespoons vanilla extract

-1 1/4 cups milk

-2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

Instructions

• Prior to starting, get the eggs and butter to room temperature. Grease and flour 2 cupcake/muffin tins, or add cupcake wrappers to trays.

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
2. In a separate bowl, stir together the salt, baking powder, and flour.
3. Beat butter in an electric mixer on high for 30 seconds. Add sugar and beat until combined. Continue to beat and add the eggs. Beat well and add vanilla extract.
4. Add part of the flour mixture, then part of the milk and beat on low. Repeat until all of the milk and flour mixture have been added. Combine and spread batter into cupcake pans.
5. Bake for 15-18 minutes, until the cupcakes are golden brown and toothpick comes out clean from the center. Cool for at least 15 minutes then remove from pans. Frost cupcakes as desired.

Things I learned while making these: You definitely need quite a few bowls for this. I just did not have enough. Make sure the butter is beat well before you start adding other things because you'll get chunks of butter in your mix if you don't. Don't fill the cupcake wrappers all the way to the top. The cupcakes come out HUGE!

I wanted to make some homemade strawberry icing, but the recipe that I wanted to use had weird ingredients, so I just ended up buying already made strawberry frosting:

The cupcakes were GOOD. I just haven't made these again since then, and I want to make a vanilla bean cupcake that links to the page I found this recipe on.