When word gets out to a few of your closest friends, and a few of their closest friends, that you like to make cakes…be warned - especially if all of your friends happen to also have wedding fever. When my friends Jesse and Erin mentioned that they wanted to have cupcakes at their wedding, I was fresh off of a part time job at a commercial cupcake kitchen so I took on the assignment with almost no prompting. Four months later, with only 10 hours to do the deed, 144 cupcakes sounded a little more scary than I had originally figured.

I used my tried and true from scratch chocolate and yellow cake recipes. True to form they cooked up in twenty minutes and one double batter of each flavor totaled twelve dozen. At this point, I was busy patting myself on the back for finishing baking before noon and for the fact that my kitchen still resembled a kitchen…and not a war zone!

I always glaze over the frosting (pun totally intended). Its the last step. It should be easier than baking from scratch. But it never is. I had decided to use a basic buttercream with the secret weapon of corn syrup ( I know. But I found organic, so that’s better than nothing, right?) to make sure that my frosting was smooth and workable. I’ve experimented with recipes that are mostly butter and powdered sugar but I find them to be kind of tasteless and make my teeth hurt from all the sugar. Definitely not wedding worthy.

I’d forgotten, however, that the last time I used the syrup recipe the frosting was way too buttery and soft - making any kind of interesting piping totally impossible. Add to this recipe, a hot humid day and a rapidly tiring chef. The end result was two batches of very chocolate-y and vanilla-y butter. Sweet but still more butter like than frosting like. For this reason, my piping ended up looking kind of sloppy. Over all they looked pretty good and tasted pretty good but I can’t help wondering, does someone out there have a righteous recipe for butter cream that tastes good, pipes well and isn’t entirely based on Crisco?

Oh and the reason that there were only 143 cupcakes was that my dog performed the most important duty of quality control. She had no issues with the soft frosting. Thanks Olive but dont’ tell the bride!

Tags: baking, cupcakes, wedding

This entry was posted on Monday, July 21st, 2008 at 11:28 am and is filed under Cooking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.