Revenge of the mini cupcakes!

You know how sometimes a recipe makes more than what they say it will?
This recipe is supposed to make 36 little cupcakes.

I've been wanting to try this recipe since seeing it in Oprah's Feb magazine. Then my soon to be sister-in-law mentioned that she and my brother-in-law are having as their wedding cake, cupcakes from the featured cupcake makers, and probably this very type I wanted to make! So I decided this weekend would be the weekend I tried it.

But...
Wouldn't you think a recipe in Oprah would be relatively easy?









FIRST I couldn't find cake flour. I looked EVERYWHERE, meaning the two places I shop. I finally settled on Pastry flour, cause the bag said it was great for cakes.

THEN it called for two table spoons of red no taste food coloring gel. I have red no taste food coloring something other than gel. It's very small. So I used 1/4 tsp. I figured it was a concentrated version.

THEN it called for me to sift the flour and salt together. Um...I might have attempted to use kosher salt, since that is my standard baking salt. And, well, that doesn't sift very well. For a while I thought I might have broken my sifter.

Then it said to alternate adding the flour/salt mix and the wet coca/red stuff/buttermilk mix into the butter/sugar mix. Except it specifically said the former should be done in three parts and the latter in two. I can count, y'all, I really can, but if I followed those directions, I would have ended up with flour/salt all over the place. So I did it in a 4 and 3 part way.

I think when it said cider vinegar without specifying the type of cider that they meant apple cider vinegar, since that's all that was at my store...but then again, my store didn't have cake flour...

and oh, yeah, that whole makes 36 little cupcake thing? I have a mini pan that makes 24 mini cupcakes. I can't imagine cramming any more spaces on this size of a pan! So I decided I'd just make a double batch. Each cupcake paper got 1 tbs of mixture (um, that was more than the 2/3 full than the recipe called for, but I think by now you've figured out that I don't follow directions well *).

I never thought I'd make almost 3 batches of these things!

And...

To make things worse, I started the special frosting before tasting a cupcake.
I tasted the cupcakes and was all like eww, it's all grainy like if I'd dropped it in sand at the beach, and even worse, it's bland- and I know there's sugar in there! Icky Icky icky I wonder if the icing will save it oh no the icing is burnt! The mixture had jumped from not boiling to burnt while I was tasting. Sigh.












At least dinner turned out. I guess this weekend wasn't my weekend for new recipes. Now I need to figure out what to do with the 3 sticks of butter that I had unwrapped and cut into small pieces in preparation for making the frosting.


* I guess some things never really change