vanilla cupcakes

Yesterday was my good friend Danielle's birthday, so baking was obviously in store.  Normally I default to brownies for friend's birthdays, but this time I wanted to try something different, so I opted for cupcakes.

When it comes to baking, I think the end product is almost entirely reliant upon picking out a good recipe, because the rest is just about following instructions. But choosing a good recipe can be a difficult task.  In this case, I initially set out to recreate Magnolia's cupcakes (we had them a couple weeks ago at work and they were so good I continued to eat the stale ones that were leftover last week).  Surprisingly (or not), Magnolia has three cookbooks sharing the bakery owner's famous recipes, and the second one, More from Magnolia contains the recipe for vanilla cupcakes. But it calls for an alarming amount of sugar and butter; and after reading a lot of the negative reviews on Food Network ("SO OVERATED!!!!!!!"; "EXTREMELY sweet"; "spongy and dried out quickly") I started second-guessing it.

So I turned to JoyofBaking.com, one of my go-to sites for cakes, quick breads, and bars.  It's not the most sophisticated website, and the ads are pretty annoying, but they have consistently good, very manageable recipes and a nice little introduction explaining the history and summary of each offering.

Like many of its recipes, JoyofBaking's vanilla cupcakes with vanilla buttercream frosting requires few ingredients and the steps are simple and straightforward.  (In fact, this recipe is quite similar to the Magnolia recipe, but with less butter and sugar.)

I used a mini muffin pan for the bite-size variety (...and because that's the only size pan I have).  The recipe yielded almost exactly 24 mini cupcakes.

Pre-oven

The cupcakes browned at the edges after about 18 minutes.  (Please excuse the imperfect ones in this batch.)

Baking complete

The cake had a nice flavor and a decent texture: not too dry, not too spongy.  The frosting, on the other hand, turned out to be too sugary, though it had a nice, whipped consistency.  (From all of the cupcake reviews and "best of" lists, I gather it's really difficult to nail down a good vanilla frosting.)

Vanilla buttercream frosting

Though I hope to one day master the art of piping icing, I like the homemade look on cupcakes.  So I stuck to my tried-and-true method of massaging it around into dips and waves with a butter knife.  My mom instilled in me a suspicion towards food coloring, so I left these au natural and decided to accessorize instead.  I love making and buying things for Danielle because she's the girliest person I know, and doing such allows me to unleash my inner girly side.  So I went crazy with the pink sugar sprinkles and rainbow snowflakes (which, mind you, do contain food coloring...but it feels less deliberate this way).

Girlified

Probably not the best vanilla cupcake recipe out there, but it's a good, traditional, homemade one (and anyway they photograph nicely). Click here for the full recipe.  And please, if you have a great vanilla cupcake recipe, please share!