Cupcake Baking 101: Vanilla Cupcakes with a Secret Ingredient!

Hi! Are you ready to bake cupcakes with me?

I am assuming you have stayed with me and learned all about cupcake baking basics.  If not, I do hope you visit Bake Happy’s Tutorials Page so you won’t miss out on all the fun.

We now move on to baking cupcake bases. By bases, I mean we will learn to bake the basic and most well liked of cupcake flavors – chocolate and vanilla. These cupcake flavors are the foundation of most of the cupcake flavors we can possibly make. 

For this post, we zoom in on vanilla. I just recently said I love mint, but I love chocolate as well. And crema de fruta, and tiramisu. And I could not just not include vanilla in the list. That would be an injustice to the silent beauty that is vanilla.

You know what, being a baker, most people would assume that I have that one flavor, that one baked good that tops all the rest. I dread being asked that question. What you’ll get from me is a blank nervous, wide eyed stare. Unfortunately, I don’t have an answer. 

And when I discover a new favorite (like when I discovered baklava), I don’t discard an old favorite to make room for the new one. My heart just expands…erm,  grows (or technically, should it be the stomach?). Is this how moms with two or more kids feel like? 

I love the little vanilla beans in this cupcake. Heaven.

So back to the topic. I love vanilla and I have something special to share. A secret that will change your life forever…not. 

Here’s my Vanilla Cupcake recipe. It’s a combination of three recipes really. 

I got the - 

• Ingredients from I Like You by Amy Sedaris (Tattletail’s Vanilla Cupcakes)

• Secret ingredient from Confections of a Closet Master Baker (Golden Eggs) 

• Procedure from Retro Desserts (Diner Style Strawberry Shortcake)

Vanilla Cupcakes

Adapted from I Like You/Retro Desserts/Confections of a Closet Master Baker

375F

Ingredients

1 ½  cups unsalted butter

1 ¼ cup milk

1 ½ cup sugar (if you have vanilla sugar, that would be nice)

2 eggs

2 ½ cake flour

2 ½ tsp baking powder

¼ tsp salt

½ tsp nutmeg (secret ingredient)

2 tsp vanilla extract and / or 1 vanilla pod 

Procedure


Line cupcake pan with paper cups.
Preheat oven.
In a saucepan, bring milk and butter (if using vanilla beans, add them here) to a boil. Remove from heat and cool.

In a large bowl, sift or dry whisk flour, baking powder, salt, nutmeg.
In a mixing bowl, beat the eggs and sugar until pale yellow, fluffy and double in volume.
While still beating, add the butter/milk mixture.

Fold in the flour mixture (if using  vanilla extract mix it into the mixture as well)
Fill the cups two-thirds full with cake batter.

Bake for 15 to 20  minutes.

The result: perfectly domed vanilla cupcakes.

These vanilla cupcakes are perfect. I just don’t know how else to describe them until my friend Kat  said.. her exact words “lumulutang yung vanilla”. Translation: the vanilla flavor just sparkles in these cupcakes. "Sparkles" may not be the right word but something pretty close to that. 

And that my friends, is a wrap.

Happy Cupcaking, 

Aikko

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Rum Drenched Vanilla Cake

I started running.

Not actually running, it was more like a walk-run-pant-stop-walk-run-pant-stop-walk kind of run. But hey, it's a start. 

There is one weird thing about this. I think of cupcakes when I run. Will that make me lose weight slower? I hope not.

But then again, I go to my weekly boxing sessions with my friend Abbie. That should help, right?

You know what might not help?

This Rum Drenched Vanilla Cake.

Even more so that it's a recipe from Dorie Greenspan.

If it's from Dorie, it must be a guaranteed hit.

And it is.

So maybe I'll reward myself with one bite. Okay, make that three. Yummy!!!

Dorie Greenspan's Rum Drenched Vanilla Cakes

from All Cakes Considered

For the cake:
1 stick plus 7 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 2/3 cups all purpose flour
2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
pinch of salt
2 1/3 cups sugar
6 large eggs
1 plump vanilla bean
2/3 cup whipping cream
2 1/2 tablespoons dark rum


For the syrup:
1/3 cup water
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup dark rum





To make the cake:
1. Center a rack and pre-heat the oven to 350 degrees F. Line the bottom of your loaf pans with parchment paper and spray the sides and bottoms with baking spray.
2. Melt your butter, either on the stove top or in the microwave on high power. Set aside and let it cool. In the meantime, take out your eggs and bring them to room temperature (about 30 minutes).
3. In a separate bowl, dry whisk the flour baking powder and salt together. Set aside.
4. In a large bowl, measure out the sugar and then add the eggs, one at a time, whisking after each addition until throughly blended with the sugar.
5. Split the vanilla bean in half scrape out the beans and put it in the egg/sugar mixture. Then add the cream, then the rum.
6. Using a rubber spatula, gently add a third of the flour mixture, stirring until just blended before adding the next third. Repeat until all of the flour mixture has been blended in. The batter should be smooth and thick.
7. Fold in half of the melted butter. When incorporated, fold in the rest.

8. Pour the batter into the prepared pans and smooth the tops with a spatula.
9. Place the pans on a cookie or baking sheet and bake. After 30 minutes, check the cakes for color. If they are browning too quickly, take a sheet of aluminum foil and lightly cover them.
10. Bake for an additional 25 or 30 minutes, until a toothpick or thin knife inserted in the center of each cake comes out clean.


To make the syrup:
11. You start by making a simple syrup. Stir the water and sugar together in a medium saucepan over medium heat. After the sugar dissolves, bring the mixture to a medium boil. (Medium, because a full boil will burn the sugar and you do not want that, believe me). Remove the pan from the heat and stir in the rum. Pour the syrup into a heat-proof bowl to cool.


To finish the cake:
12. When the cakes are done, cool for five minutes in the pans before unmolding them to cake racks.
13. Place the cake racks over a baking sheet lined with parchment or wax paper to catch the drips. Using a thin knife or a long toothpick or a cake tester, poke holes through the cake.
14. Slowly brish the cakes with syrup, allowing time for the cakes to absorb the syrup. Leave the cakes on the racks to cool to room temperature before serving.


Happy cupcaking,
Aikko

Magnolia Bakery Cookbook Series: Lemon Vanilla Bundt Cake

You know a cake is a hit when you bake a Bundt cake in the morning, left it to cool, meet up with friends and come home to find the cake not only cooled down but almost half gone. We’ll I’m exaggerating a bit but that kind of made my day. Best baking compliment I’ve ever received.

This is the fifth recipe I made from the Magnolia Bakery Cookbook. So far, so good. Some recipes are a keeper while some I decided not to make for a very long time (Yup, me and the muffins still have a score to settle).

The recipe is simple enough, it contains only seven ingredients and the procedure is something I am familiar with. No “making a well” this time, just plain old fashioned creaming method which I am comfortable doing already. There was a time not so long ago, the creaming method gave me headaches. Remember the “not be repeated kapeng barako cupcakes? Good thing that old adage is true: practice makes perfect.

I wanted this cake to be extra special so instead of using 2

tablespoon of vanilla extract I used one plump and moist

Vanilla bean. Since I was too lazy to go to Glorietta, I

bought the bean at the Salcedo Saturday Market which unfortunately

cost me 100 times more than I usually pay for a bean but when

I took a bite of the cake, it was worth it.

Oops… I digressed… back to the cake, I call it the nibble cake because it’s the type of cake you dump into a cake stand in the middle of a coffee table, hand out forks to everyone and tell them to start nibbling. The perfect cake to share over good talks and long bonding moments.

This is a cake I’ll definitely bake again and again.

Happy cupcaking!
Aikko