Birthday cupcakes

L came over to play with his jet ski today, since he's taking A out for her birthday tomorrow to try wakeboarding. I wasn't very social, but that was because I didn't know he was coming over and I already had my agenda of baking cupcakes for A. I prepped the stuff in the morning, setting up the mixer, measuring out the water and oil, and lining the muffin tins.

Giada's strawberry and marscapone filled cupcakes looked so good on TV, and I've been itching for an excuse to bake them. Like the hazelnut crunch cake, this relied on boxed cake mix. Now that I've tried two of her boxed cake mix recips, I now know why she uses the instant stuff--the amount of work that goes into the end product is absolutely ridiculous, and if it also involved baking a cake from scratch, it would never fall under the everyday category. I used some Duncan Hines Vanilla cake mix and got 22 cupcakes out of them when using an ice cream scoop as a measure.

They baked at 330 degrees (to accommodate Jim's cool oven) for 24 minutes and turned out beautifully. Meanwhile, I worked on the filling, which was marscapone cheese, thawed frozen strawberries that were also drained, lemon juice, and sugar. I blended it all together in the food processor and put the stuff into a parchment paper pastry bag, which is where it all started going downhill. This filling was a lot waterier than regular frosting, and as a result, the mixture kept breaking the bags. I had to go through five of them. Also, due to the sogginess, I couldn't really build up enough pressure to adequately fill all of the cupcakes, so some of them ended up with very little filling. I did like the taste of the filling, though, so that was at least good.



After I filled 21 out of the 22 and basically ran out of filling, I started icing the outside. Thanks to the reviews of the recipe on foodnetwork.com, I heated up vanilla, sugar, water, and then stirred in powdered sugar over a double boiler. The icing hardened up very quickly, and as soon as it left the heat, it solidified. This made icing them so easy, because there were essentially no drips. I just drizzled it all of the top with a spatula and held it over the bowl for a few seconds and voila!

The craziest thing was that it took me 2 hours to make those dang cupcakes, and that was will all my prep already done!! Now in all fairness to Giada, I would have saved a lot of time had I used my brain and a plastic pastry bag, but still. It was an awful lot of work. The end product was beautiful and totally worthwhile, but I guess when I see instant cake mix, I think quick and easy. So not the case with Giada. Well, her espresso brownies are easy, but even those take a lot of time with the icing.





I also coached L through his attempt at an instant cake. He sent me a picture of the thing, and he did a good job. I thought it was absolutely adorable.