Cupcakes are the best. I usually follow the same recipe for good old fairy cakes, but I decided to treat myself and buy the Hummingbird bakery cookbook recently. So I thought I'd start off with the nice simple vanilla cupcakes on the first page- what could go wrong? Apparently, many things! XD
To start with our measuring jug only measures in increments of 50ml, so when 20ml of milk is called for, a guesstimate has to do. Following the recipe I then added all of this to my mixture, which meant I had a cake mix the consistency of pancake batter! Managed to sort of spoon it into cases, and stuck them in the oven. Everything was going well and they started rising nicely. Time up, cakes come out, all nice and risen. Ten minutes later they are all looking depressingly concave?!?
So I decide the frosting is going to have to be awesome to hide the fact they've all caved in, so I set to work on that, again following their instructions rather than what I normally do. More milk is called for, again, I add to much because I can't measure accurately, the only thing for it is to keep beating it until it stiffens up. The book tells me to beat for five minutes straight, so I do. I then think I will add some blue food colouring, to get a nice pastel colour- bad idea. Turns out the beating has somehow managed to curdle my icing, meaning when I add blue the bowl becomes a mess of blue icing, but then then fact it's split is evident, because the curdles stuff stays white, Great! Anyway I put it all together, and covered with sprinkles, and oddly enough, they were actually some of the nicest tasting cakes I've made. But definitely a bit of a failure overall.