I do believe my cupcake techniques are getting better. I've actually been proud of the last couple of cupcakes I've made. These are coconut cupcakes I made for Joe's company Christmas party and for my piano student's recital. Can you say, "YUM!!"? This is another Martha Stewart recipe that I got out of her Baking Handbook. A deliciously moist cupcake with "7-minute" frosting, which fyi, doesn't take 7 minutes to make. It actually takes about 15 (20 if you count clean-up) but it is DELICIOUS!!! No butter in it, just egg whites, corn syrup and sugar. I used raw sugar and it was just fine.
Then I rolled the fresh-iced cupcakes in sanding sugar. I've purchased all my decorating sanding sugars at Williams-Sonoma. They are larger crystals of sugar. But I'll be totally honest, I compared their green and red sanding sugar to the green or red sprinkles I've purchased at the grocery store and there isn't much difference in appearance. Maybe flavor, but I didn't taste them.
Ah, my snowmen lined up like soldiers in the light of the Christmas tree. I love how the sanding sugar sparkles. I doubled-up my liners, like I always do. But when it came time to presenting them, I went ahead and removed the red and white snowflake liners and just kept the white ones. I kind of liked that even better.
Okay, so I've reached a whole new level of baking with this cupcake. I was tired of producing cupcakes of different mass so I actually weighed every SINGLE cupcake. All the cupcakes have 64 grams of batter. They are perfect. I even did the snowman balls that way. Snowman head was 1 gram, middle was 3, bottom was 5. Hello, Martha! Are you out there? Have I reached your level of awesomeness yet? Perhaps I have exceeded it?!
Look at these beauties. All perfectly round and evenly sized.
