Cupcake Adventure #1

Raspberry Lemonade Cupcake with Vanilla filling and Lemon whipped topping

The colors are bad, but the frosting is light yellow, the cupcake is light pink, and the whole thing looks kinda messy because it is. The Joy of Cooking is full of shit when it says you can just take a cupcake and twirl it upside down in frosting to coat.

Aesthetics aside (even though, really, that's what cupcakes are all about), this was a fairly successful first attempt. I caught my mistake of adding twice as much butter as was called for before I added any other ingredients (though not before creaming it--but whipped butter is all the rage, right?) and I resisted the urge to fuss with the recipe when I realized the cake wasn't going to taste like lemonade at all. I was sad that there's no actual citrus taste in the cake, so I added a little food coloring so it was at least pink.

Other tweaks included just using vanilla pudding make with heavy whipping cream as my cupcake filler (so freaking rich! It's perfect and easy!) and adding a packet of lemon jello to the whipped cream topping to serve as frosting. The idea was that it would work like stabilized whipped cream (a la gelatin) but have coloring and flavor as well. It turned out a little...chunky...but I think that's due to my flawed gelatin preparation than to the overall principle.

Clearly my frosting application technique...needs technique. And possibly a frosting tube.

However! These cupcakes are considerably more successful than my last attempt, years ago, which were not edible (pumpkin, with a cream cheese frosting *shudder*). These cupcakes are edible, tasty, way too rich and a pain in the ass to eat. The filling leads to structural integrity problems, and my foolish purchase of shiny foil liners means that they are actually double-lined and unwitting houseguests might get a mouth full of hidden liner. Oops.

I think that filled cupcakes are...problematic. In the future I might just do a chocolate cake with the vanilla pudding stuff as a topping, since it was fairly firm.

Plan for Cupcake Adventure #2 (which may be a while from now, as I am going camping next week): red velvet with a cream cheese or chocolate frosting. Possibly piped!