Cupcake society

Multiply a cupcake mixture by 1.5 usually makes enough for a 9 inch cake tin.

I meant the oreos at the bottom! Or are you using a different recipe to the one I have?

TBH I think a lot of the recipes in the Hummingbird book haven't translated down from an industrial kitchen very well at all. Their red velvet cake calls for something like nearly a full bottle of red food colouring!

Concave cupcakes is either because your oven temp. wasn't correct, or a throwback to too much milk. You probably would've been better off to add a little more flour if you put too much milk in. As for the icing, was it a frosting? Your butter might have been the problem there, tbh. Confusing.

Yikes, that's a lot of food colouring!? Hmm yep I reckon they collapsed due to the milk, since the oven was set at the right temp, and works fine. Ah right, next time I'll try that, I was trying to follow the recipe to a tee that first time. Yep, well, it was called frosting, and consisted of both milk, butter, icing sugar and vanilla essence. Maybe less beating would have stopped it curdling, but they suggest beating to get it lighter and fluffier? It all tasted alright though, I think maybe a couple more attempts at it, and altering the amounts of milk might sort out my collapsing and curdling issues hopefully!

I think they mean food colouring paste tbh, though my sister made them and she follows recipes to the *letter* so it could be a 'use common sense' thing!

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.

As for the measuring - if you've got tea/tablespoon measurements, they would be useful for measuring. I *think* a tablespoon is 5mls (or maybe that's a teaspoon?), so 4 of those would be more accurate

I love cupcakes! I'm planning on buying this book:


once my exams are over. Otherwise I'll spend too much time baking and not enough time revising.

<3 One of my favourites. I have a few now; Primrose, Hummingbird and (my latest) Lets Make Whoopies! Primrose is really good

Chocolate cupcakes with vanilla buttercream icing and crushed Maltesers

Ice Cream Cakes! (On sticks )

Just made Cola Cupcakes, shall post pictures soon.