How to | Vanilla Cupcakes

Last weekend truly felt like a disaster weekend for me. My blog went offline and both the phone and internet connection didn’t work. So what’s a blogger to do without their blog or internet? I decided to take my baking skills to the next level to take my mind off of things and bake my first vanilla cupcake batch! Nothing beats a good sugar rush on a boring Sunday.

Vanilla cupcake base (24 cupcakes)

What you need

435 g flour
400 g sugar
190 g soft butter
4 big eggs (or 5 smaller ones)
300 ml buttermilk
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 teaspoon sodium bicarbonate
1 teaspoon vanilla-essence
1/2 teaspoon salt

Get started

1. Preheat the oven to 170° C.
2. Sift the flour with the baking powder, sodium bicarbonate and salt. Put it aside.
3. Put the soft butter in a bowl of a kitchen machine and beat it until it’s creamy. Add the sugar little by little and beat it for another 3 minutes until the mixture is light & creamy. While beating, add the eggs one by one (beat for 20 seconds after adding each egg).
4. Mix the buttermilk with the vanilla-essence in a separate bowl and add the butter-sugar mix. Add the sifted dry ingredients you put aside bit by bit while beating the mixture.
5. The batter is now ready to go in the oven. Fill the cupcake wrappers for about 3/4 and bake them in the oven for 30 – 35 minutes. This is only an indication since this depends on the kind of oven you have. You’ll know when your cupcakes are ready by inserting a toothpick in your cupcake. If there isn’t any batter sticking on the toothpick, your cupcake base is ready!

Vanilla butter cream frosting (500 g)

1. Beat 100 g butter (room temperature) with 200 g powder sugar for 30 seconds with an electric mixer.
2. Add 60 ml cream and 1,5 teaspoon vanilla essence. Beat for about 4 minutes at medium-high speed until the mixture is creamy and smooth.
3. Add another 200 g powder sugar bit by bit (beat for 1 minute each time you add some).
4. You can now add pigment if you like. For my pink-purple colored frosting I used 3 blue drops and 8 red drops.
5. Keep on beating until the frosting has the desired consistency and is easy to spread.

You can now start dressing up your cupcake as you please (I still need to work on my decorating skills, obviously). I used a pastry bag with star-shaped tip to decorate mine, followed by some heart-shaped sprinkles (you can find several decorative products in the supermarket). The cupcakes do taste better when you keep the frosting in the fridge until the next day before you use them on the cupcakes. I promise it will be worth the wait!

*Drool*