Never Bashful with Butter

Ok, you know I had to do it.

Its just not possible to make anything Swedish in my house without indulging in a fair amount of Swedish Chef-speak, and trust me.. There were plenty of “bork bork bork’s” uttered this morning in my house.

I know these little cupcakes just look like regular old cupcakes, but they have a story.

They’re modeled off of Swedish Princess Cakes.  The marzipan coated, whipped cream iced, raspberry jam and custard filled sponge cake domes that really aren’t very common anywhere near where I currently live.

Sure, I’ve seen them on the internet, and thats exactly where I got the idea to make these cute little cupcakes. They’re just like regular princess cakes, only they’re bite sized, and filled, instead of layered.

The thing about these cupcakes, is that they’re really labour intensive.

Not only do you have to make the sponge cake, but you’ve got to “soak” it in a sort of sugar syrup. Then fill it with raspberry jam and vanilla custard. Then add a giant mound of sweetened whipped cream, and cover the whole thing in a thin layer of green marzipan. The pink rose is the traditional decoration, and I figured since I put so much work into these little buggers, I might as well keep it simple with the decoration.

But why would I spend my entire morning making a dozen cupcakes, when I could have spent about 10 minutes making a dozen similar ones?

Herein lies a little bit of a story.

You see, my husband currently works for a company which is ran by Swedish people.
Well, I guess that story is a lot shorter than I thought it would be.

Anyways, My husband is quitting his job, and although there have been a few issues with his co-workers, but not anyone that he works with directly, He really likes the people he works with. When he first got the job, the owner of the company, whose name I don’t know but I probably couldn’t spell anyways, took my husband out to dinner, and told him how great of an employee he is, and how happy he was that they hired him.

Since then, he’s called my husband probably once a month just to make sure everything is alright with him. From what I’ve gathered, this guy is pretty cool.

So, since my husband has been bringing in my cupcakes to work for his co-workers ever since I started this blog, I figure I’d send along a special batch, as Swedish as the boss, for Aaron’s resignation day.

I mean, I thought about other Swedish things, but sending packages of Swedish fish to work with him just didn’t have the same sentimentality behind it.

This special one is for the boss-

Pretty pretty princess cakes!

The one in front is my favourite…

So this recipe I snagged from I-village. I changed a few insignificant things about it, but I can’t claim that its my own recipe at all.

However, since the recipe is posted on the internet in the first place, I’ll provide a link to the original recipe, if you’d like to make a traditional Swedish princess cake of your own. I’ll give the details of how to make little princess cupcakes, below.

• Instead of using round cake pans, I used a muffin tin with a dozen cupcake papers, and 2 four inch cake pan rounds. The recipe will probably make 24 cupcakes if you would like to just make cupcakes with it.

• Instead of using rum in the soaking solution, I used lemon juice.
• Instead of brushing on the soaking solution, I cut the top of the cupcake off and poked about 5 holes in it with a tooth pick. Then I spooned on about a teaspoon of the soaking solution.
• To fill the cupcakes, I used a sharp knife to remove a cone of cake from the center of the cupcake, then I spooned in a little raspberry jam and some of the vanilla pastry cream.
• I piped on a generous mound of whipped cream on top of the cupcake and placed a thin round of green marzipan on top, as well as a rolled marzipan rose.

Really, it was a bit labour intensive, just with all the individual things you have to make, but very simple to assemble, and SO TASTY when its all put together.

-A.

No really. I think its quite possible.

I mean, most of my childhood breakfasts were made up of some sort of premade boxed breakfast cereals…

Well, except for the special occasion breakfasts like birthdays and holidays.. and for a while we didn’t have the money to buy breakfast cereal, but we raised chickens, so we ate a lot of french toast and scrambled eggs.

And sure, my fondest childhood breakfast stories do NOT center around the almighty box of cereal. Most of those breakfasts center around stories that are just too good not to tell. Stories that really have a message, Stories that I feel compelled to write down so that someday, when I can’t remember for myself, I can look back at what I wrote down in my younger days, and smile.

The Breakfast cereal stories aren’t so special. They typically begin with me, as a really young kid, drowning a bowl full of otherwise healthy corn, oat, wheat or other grain based cereal in a heaping mound of granulated sugar, and quickly pouring a healthy dose of milk on top before my neverbashfulwithbutter.comhttp://www.neverbashfulwithbutter.commom or dad could tell the difference between my cereal and theirs.

I’ll admit it. I loved sugar on my cereal. I wish I could say I was exaggerating, but I really did pour a ton of sugar on top of my cereal. Probably a half as much as the amount of actual cereal in the bowl, was sugar.

I found ways around it, when times got tough and my parents started noticing that the sugar supply was dwindling. I’d use my dad’s coffee creamer, half and half, even whole milk, if I could convince my mom to buy that instead of the regular skim that she bought. Anything to add a little bit of sweetness to my cereal, and I was happy.

I was raised on unsweetened cereal.

I was eating grape nuts and corn flakes when my friends were eating sugar smacks and going coo-coo for cocoa puffs.

After begging and pleading with my mom to buy the “kids” cereals, I finally took matters into my own hands, and applied my own sugar. If you’ve ever eaten grape nuts cereal with skim milk, I’m sure you understand.

Cereal, still, was a mainstay in my childhood home. It was there, on top of the refrigerator for many late night cereal fueled scary movie watching slumber parties, It was there, in the cabinet next to the stove, when my mom didn’t feel like making dinner, or it was just too hot to cook.

Finally, when my little sisters were born, and my parents were too preoccupied worrying about the twins than worrying about my older sister and me eating florescent coloured cereal rolled in 7 different types of sugar, we were finally allowed to get the good stuff.

Frosted mini wheats.

I know.. I know, frosted mini-wheats sounds downright healthy compared to fruit loops, sugar smacks, cocoa pebbles, capt’n crunch and his crunch berries, and a whole barrel of other sugar drenched cereals, aimed and marketed directly at children.  But to us, they were amazing.

You see, we were familiar with a cereal that my mom called “Bales of hay”. Better known as Shredded wheat.

It  came in a regular  cereal box, and there were four paper tubes inside, each with two “bales”. These bales were huge, healthy, and not all that flavourful. My mom knew just how un-tasty they were, so she would allow us 1 teaspoon of sugar per bale that we ate. This was actually how I learned that you can put sugar on cereal, and what began the downward spiral towards total sugar annihilation with the grape nuts.

My sister and I found that the best way to apply the sugar was after the bales had been rolled in a half filled bowl of milk, spooned directly onto the top of the bale, and once the milk had started to absorb into the sugar, spread the sugar/milk paste on the bales, then quickly eat them before the sugar dispersed throughout the milk.  We were both big on drinking the milk after eating our cereal, and overly sweetened milk just did not work well for cleansing the palate.

Anyways, so when we found out that there was a smaller version of our bales of hay, only they came pre-sugared, and you could ACTUALLY SEE THE SUGAR ON TOP, which was a sure sign of a delicious cereal in our minds, we begged our mom to buy them for us. She agreed, probably not even paying attention to the box, she’d just had twins for goodness sakes.

We quickly got bored with regular frosted mini-wheats. Sure, they sounded good in theory, but the sugar on top melted into the milk too quickly, and the wheat part got soggier a lot faster than the larger size shredded wheat. Plus, back then it was a lot more expensive, so we settled on getting mom to buy florescent cereals like froot loops, and the various other movie/cartoon/television themed cereals that came out in the early 90’s.

Since then, I’ve pretty much stuck with the healthier types of cereal out there. Sure, I partake in the occasional box of krusty-O’s, and every now and then my husband picks up a bag of the generic version of Lucky Charms. I’m not gonna argue with him. hehe..

I’ve even been known to eat grape nuts, only without the added sugar. I guess I grew out of that habit. Thank goodness.
So just the other day, I went to my moms house, and what do I see, but my little sister sitting on the front porch with her hand in a box of strawberry flavoured frosted mini wheats.

Entering the house, I tell my mom how funny I think it is that they’ve gone and made a new variety of frosted mini wheats.. and she proceeds to pull four more DIFFERENT boxes of frosted mini wheats from the cabinet by the stove.

Apparently Kelloggs has been busy making a few different varieties of frosted mini wheats. And I couldn’t help but photograph them all.

Five different varieties-

And apparently, the strawberry and vanilla cream flavoured versions have “Crunchlets” listed as an ingredient.

These ones have an amazing smell to them. I really liked these ones, I felt like I was smelling a vanilla bean.

These were a little heavy on the cinnamon for me. A little spicy, but I guess some people Like that. My mom thought they tasted like cinnamon rolls.

I love these.
They’re pink, they don’t taste like fake strawberry, and they made the milk pink, but not overly sweet.

Definately the most boring new flavour. Similar to pancakes with syrup. They were good, but the maple was much stronger than the brown sugar, and I had hoped it was the other way around.

The original.
Ok, so its the bigger size. Halfway between a full sized piece of shredded wheat and one of the bite sized mini wheats, Who doesn’t love the original?

after much deliberation, and many bowls of cereal and milk, I had to make a decision as to which was my favourite…

Vanilla Creme- for the win!

It was just simple enough to make a good breakfast, and not fake tasting at all. One might actually think its healthy for you… until you inquire about the crunchlets.

-A.

We’ve all been there.. Its been entirely too long since you’ve gone to the grocery store, and you feel like there is no food left in the house, but you’ve got plenty of “stuff” hanging out in your cupboards and fridge.

Yeah, that was me this morning.

I wanted to make something for the blog, but I didn’t feel like walking to the store just to buy stuff when I’ve got plenty of random “stuff” all over my kitchen, I just have to get creative and put it all together.

Starting out with pantry goods, I gathered the makings of a standard pie crust- Sugar, Flour, Shortening.

Should I make a chocolate filling? I grabbed the chocolate chips.

Onto the fridge,  Scrapping the shortening, I grab a stick of butter. A brick of cream cheese, milk, Those pecans I’ve been snacking on for the past month, and a jar of caramel sauce I made the week before last for the ice cream I made but was unable to post about due to its mysterious disappearance when my husband came home early from work. *raises eyebrow* yeah, I think we all knoneverbashfulwithbutter.comhttp://www.neverbashfulwithbutter.comw what happened there.

Anyways, I gathered all these components, plus a lemon, and a visit to the spice rack added cinnamon, nutmeg and ginger.

I had originally set out to make one tart, but whats the point in making one tart shell? Then I decided it would be fun to see if I could make a few different tarts all with the same ingredients.

And this is how I ended up with today’s entry-

First, I made enough dough for three tart shells, and baked them.  Then I separated the main ingredients into three parts-

One tart, three ways- all leftovers.

I started off easy, mixing a portion of the cream cheese with cinnamon, nutmeg and sugar to make a sort of cheesecake cream, topping that off with caramel and chocolate dipped raw pecans-

Then I mixed some of the caramel in with some of the leftover cream cheese, added a little ginger and sugar, topped it off with crumbled oven toasted pecans and drizzled it with caramel and chocolate-

The third tart looks the best to me…
After pouring about a tablespoon of caramel into the bottom of the remaining tart shell, I mixed some of the chocolate in with the remaining cream cheese and a pinch of cinnamon, spooned it on top of the caramel and topped it off with the remaining melted chocolate and a raw pecan.

While I definitely don’t have the stomach to eat all three of these tarts, I did taste the first one, and boy was it good!

So today I do believe I had myself a pretty good kitchen adventure. Only now, I really do have to get to the store if I’m to have any future kitchen adventures, as I do believe I’ve used up all of my “stuff” other than sugar and flour, which I seem to have pounds and pounds of.

As for other things, I do believe I’ll be making the most of this beautiful summer afternoon we’re having here in the Northwest, I’m gonna grab my husband right after work and head to a park to make grass angels!

I finally got around to posting about the tarts I made!

So, earlier in the week I decided to make a quick and tasty little dessert out of the little bits of “stuff” in my kitchen.

I gathered-

1 brick of cream cheese
1 cup chocolate chips
1 cup homemade caramel sauce (I’ve posted the recipe many times, or you could use store bought)
cinnamon
grated ginger
grated nutmeg

Flour
Sugar
Butter

pecans

From there, I decided to make three different tarts.

First, I started with a basic pie crust. I baked them and allowed them to cool while I mixed up the fillings.

All of the tarts have the same cream cheese base. The chocolate covered one has melted chocolate whipped into it, and both of the others have grated nutmeg and cinnamon whipped in, with the crumbly topped one having the addition of grated ginger.

I mixed all of the ingredients to taste. I really don’t have any idea how much of each thing I mixed in, other than I know that the spices were all less than half a teaspoon.

Each tart is topped in some way with pecans. I love pecans.

Basically, I’m posting this to encourage you all to try something adventurous. Make something without a recipe, and just have faith that it will taste delicious, because it probably will.

-A.

Not much for recipes today, I was much too busy with random family things to do much in the way of baking or cooking.

I’ve been trying really hard not to have any extra candy or goodies in the house, mostly sending the stuff I make for this blog away, and not really buying much in the way of candy or anything else. Sure, sometimes my sweet tooth gets the better of me, and days like today, I give it a little treat, just to keep it from really making its presence known when more overly sugary and sweet treats are within reach.

So while I was cleaning my kitchen, going through my gadgets and appliances, picking out what I want to keep, which I want to store, and which I want to get rid of, I realized I had this big old cotton candy machine just hanging out on top of the fridge. Part of me wanted to just put it in the get rid of box, but another part of me said I should keep it, because you never know when you’ll want a cotton candy machine handy.

Then my sweet tooth chimed in, and I ended up making a batch of cotton candy.  Luckineverbashfulwithbutter.comhttp://www.neverbashfulwithbutter.comly, as the robot in the photos is attempting to explain, it only took one tablespoon of sugar to make the two giant handfuls of cotton candy pictured. One tablespoon of sugar = 45 calories. Not bad when you think that two Hershey’s kisses are 50 calories.

Anyways, I happily snacked on my cotton candy while taking a break from household stuff… but I waited until after I had a little photo shoot with the green robot here…  Hey, I’ll take any excuse to post robot photos!

What’s that off in the distance?

AAAaaacK! ITS COTTON CANDY!

well, its fluffy….

And.. It is soft…

And you made all that cotton candy with only this much sugar???

See ya later sugar, I’ve got a date with a big fluffy ball of cotton candy…

I only wish I could store this stuff without it crystallizing. It would make tea parties so much more fun.
“One puff or two?”
-A.

P.S. This robot needs a name.

Living in the country, its definitely not a rarity to claim to have a berry bush of some sort in my childhood front yard. Especially not living in the Northwest.

Back when I was a kid, it seemed like everyone wanted theirs gone. All of our neighbours were often seen in the yard, donning their full on yard armor- Carhartts, Flannel, leather gloves, long boots.. The real serious ones even wearing some sort of crazy headgear consisting of a fine mesh screen being held at a distance from the face, suspended by some sort of wirework.  Always with clippers, pruning shears, scissors, shovels, rakes, post hole diggers. Some sort of weaponry against the berry bushes.

I think for a while my parents were even included in this group. Always attempting to remove the berry bush on the side of the house. Claiming it was a danger, it was attracting bees, it was an eye sore.  The only problem with being against the berry bushes, is that you have to commit to your cause, and my parents weren’t so good with that.

Noneneverbashfulwithbutter.comhttp://www.neverbashfulwithbutter.com the less, we ended up with a pretty large sized blackberry bush attached to the side of our toolshed. It started out fairly small and manageable, but quickly over a particularly damp summers, it grew well beyond the size of the toolshed, at which point my parents managed to whack it down to about half its size, and for the remainder of its life, it stayed fairly small.

Our black berry bush was nothing compared the the giant monstrosity being grown by our next door neighbours. I guess the fact that the original owner of the house grew quite old and passed away, leaving the house to her disabled son, then the house sat without an tenant for quite sometime before being occupied by a family with two kids and entirely too many vehicles in various states of repair. No one had the time or ability to deal with it and It really never was very well tended to, so it grew to an enormous size before too long.

I loved this berry bush. It was a mixture of black berry bushes, raspberry bushes and a small amount of marionberry bushes. There was another unidentifiable berry growing in there, but we never picked it for fear of it being poisonous, and seeing as how we had so many other berries to pick, it wasn’t that big of a deal, even though looking back I think it was a low lying bush berry like a huckleberry.

Anyways, this bush, being of such size that when it was later removed, it was found to have over 10 vehicles within its masses, was so full of berries that the people that owned the house didn’t mind me and a few friends going and picking a few buckets full of berries every once in a while.  I think they figured I was 15 and bored, and picking berries was much better than doing something much more destructive.

So one particular day I enlisted the help of two of my best friends, and we decided we would tackle the bush.

We suited up, thick rubber kitchen gloves for all three of us, provided by my mom who was so afraid we’d prick our fingers and catch some sort of berry bourne disease, that she insisted we remove the gloves every 15 minutes and check our fingers for cuts before resuming our berry picking. Also, we went wearing the most reasonable of outfits, shorts, tanktops and flip flops. Taking a moment to check ourselves out in the mirror, we remarked about how stylish we looked, and how it made much more sense to have our arms bare, so as not to catch any loose material in the thorns, than to worry about cutting our arms on the bushes. We weren’t worried about our legs, because we didn’t plan on stepping into the bushes, just picking from the outside. Also, being a farm girl, wearing flip flops was a bit of a stretch, as most times I would never wear shoes at all, prefering the feel of the grass and dirt on my feet and between my toes.

Grabbing a five gallon bucket each and a smaller bucket, a large bowl and a plastic garbage sack for each of our remaining hands to hold, we set off to the giant berry bush hoping to find it full of fruit and ready for picking.

It was quite a sight, the three of us dressed in summer outfits contrasted by the giant plastic kitchen gloves. Picking berries proved nearly impossible with those darned things on, they were quickly removed and placed in the garbage sack.

We spent nearly the whole evening out there, picking berries, laughing, telling jokes, singing songs (I have no idea why, but my friends and I couldn’t go anywhere without singing) and just enjoying each other’s company, gently plucking the soft fruits from the vine, inspecting them and letting them fall into the bucket below.

I don’t know which one of us said it first, but as our  buckets each reached about half full, someone mentioned that it might not be a good idea to fill the buckets all the way, as the weight of the berries on top would smash the berries on the bottom. We agreed we would fill the bowl and the smaller bucket and then return home, and if we still felt up to it and there was enough light left, we would come back and pick more berries.

Soon after that, we finished filling the bowl, and we decided to head back home. It was only about a 5 minute walk through the field, the only thing slowing us down was the fear that we might step into a hole, or a spider might jump up out of the hay below. We crossed from the field into my parents back yard and we had to stop because one of my friends had a rock stuck under their foot in their flip flop. My parents had a little park bench and some big rocks in their yard, so we all sat down, and as my other friend and I waited for our remaining friend to remove the rock, we started eating some of the berries.

Really, we couldn’t be blamed for what happened next. It was human nature… at least, 15 year old girl human nature. All it took was one berry flying in the air to land on someone’s shirt to spark an all out berry assault that would leave us red, sticky and stained, but still very tasty.

Needless to say, it only took about 20 minutes for the three of us to go from three half filled 5 gallon buckets of berries, one small bucket and a very large bowl full of berries, to no berries and three very sticky teenagers. We didn’t even get in the house before my mom found out, I think she heard our laughing and screaming from the kitchen, and when we turned towards the house she was standing on the porch holding some old dish rags and pointing the the garden hose. She didn’t look angry, but you could see the questioning look on her face.

Why would we spend such an incredibly long time picking berries just to waste them all in a bright red food fight?

As we cleaned up in the freezing cold water straight from our ground well, we didn’t really talk much. I think we all were kind of wondering what we just did, and why. After we cleaned the majority of the sticky mess off our ourselves we took turns getting approved for entrance into the house, then sprinting to the bathroom and showering off before coming back outside and sitting on the grass, enjoying the crisp, cool and windy summer evening in my parents yard while sizing up our scrapes, pricked fingers and otherwise injured selves.

We ended the evening roasting marshmallows in the burn pit and then camping out in a small pup tent that we were barely strong enough to get the stakes into the ground to secure it with. Ghost stories and large quantities of sugary snacks kept us from sleeping and ultimately led to us abandoning our outdoor post and retreating to the comfort of my parents living room.

In the morning we woke up to the sound of my mom chasing my little sisters around the house, and my dad making a giant waffle breakfast, just like he did every time I had friends over. We waited until my parents ate before finishing off every prepared breakfast food in the kitchen, and my dad laughed as he said “I dunno.. My breakfast might have been a little better with some fresh raspberries.” and winked. It seemed like for a moment my family was one of those television families, My dad the wise one who always made a wry joke of my bumbling mistakes, my mom at her wits end with my little sisters as the cuteness factor. My older sister making a cameo appearance from time to time because she’s so busy with her friends and being old enough to drive, and my friends were always around, making me appear much more cool than I am, but really, they were just there for the food (which is SO true, by the way).  It all made sense.

I remember that summer day as one of my best teenage memories. I don’t think I really truly knew what I had back then, and I never really thought that I’d look back on my childhood and wish that I hadn’t wasted so much of it being worried about so much. We were free that day. Free of responsiblity, worry. We didn’t think “Oh no, what if someone sees me looking like this.” or “ew gross, berries and bugs!” We just enjoyed ourselves living in the moment, as teenagers.

I wish I had spent more summer days that way. There were so many more berries to pick, enough for a whole summer full of berry fights.

I’ve yet to go berry picking this summer, and I know the window for berry season is drawing to a close, but my mom was able to take my sisters berry picking this weekend, and they brought me a few containers of fresh raspberries to eat and bake with.

Berries don’t seem to last very long in my house, so I froze one of the containers of berries before it had a chance to over ripen or mold. The second container I reserved for baking… but really, only about half of them made their way into this recipe, the rest…

Well.. lets just say they were very tasty.

Today I made chocolate raspberry cupcakes with raspberry cream cheese filling, chocolate icing and a little raspberry cream cheese on top.

…Uh oh.. the robots found them…

I think adding the raspberry puree really made these cakes super soft. They had such a delicate texture, and they were so moist.

Messiest bite ever.

So enjoy your summer. Enjoy the simplicity that is this change in weather, which is only temporary. Enjoy your youth if you have it, and the life you’ve lived, if you don’t.

And for goodness sakes, eat some cupcakes.

Chocolate Raspberry Cupcakes

2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, softened
1 cup granulated sugar
1 cup firmly packed light brown sugar
4 large eggs, at room temperature
6 ounces unsweetened chocolate, melted
1 cup buttermilk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 cup pureed raspberries
1 teaspoon cinnamon

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line two 12-cup muffin tins with cupcake papers and Set aside.
In a small bowl, sift together the flour, baking soda and cinnamon.

In a large bowl, on the medium speed of an electric mixer, cream the butter until smooth. Add the sugars and beat until fluffy, about 3 minutes. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. Add the chocolate, mixing until well incorporated. Add the pureed raspberries mixing well. Add the dry ingredients in three parts, alternating with the buttermilk and vanilla. With each addition, beat until the ingredients are incorporated, but do not overbeat. Using a rubber spatula, scrape down the batter in the bowl to make sure the ingredients are well blended and the batter is smooth. Carefully spoon the batter into the cupcake liners, filling them about three-quarters full. Bake for 20–25 minutes, or until a cake tester inserted in the center of the cupcake comes out clean.

Chocolate glaze

3/4 cup semisweet chocolate chips
3 tablespoons butter
1 tablespoon light corn syrup
1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract

In a double boiler over hot, but not boiling water, combine chocolate chips, butter and corn syrup. Stir until chips are melted and mixture is smooth, then add vanilla. Allow mixture to cool slightly before spooning a bit over the top of the cooled cupcakes.

Raspberry cream cheese filling and topping

1 1/2 cups thawed frozen or fresh raspberries
1 cup cream cheese
1/2 cup powdered sugar
2 tablespoons firmly packed brown sugar
pinch of cinnamon
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
milk as needed

In the bowl of a stand mixer, beat the cream cheese until smooth, scraping the sides of the bowl often to eliminate clumps. At a low speed, mix in the raspberries, brown sugar, vanilla extract and cinnamon. Blend well. Mix in the powdered sugar. When all is well blended, decide how thick you want your filling to be. If you would like it thinner, add a bit of milk, if you would like it thicker, add more powdered sugar. I left mine as is, sort of in the middle.

To fill the cupcakes, use a sharp knife to cut a circle in the center of the cupcake, lift off the top and pick out a bit of the cake inside. Using a ziplock bag with a hole cut in one end, pipe the filling into the center of the cupcake, replace the top and spoon a bit of the chocolate glaze over top. Before serving, pipe a little more of the cream cheese mixture on top of the cupcake.

Keep the cupcakes and the filling refrigerated.

-A.

-Lesley Boone

Sometimes all it takes is a little cupcake to cheer a person up. 

Today I needed a little cheering, so I made some cupcakes.

Despite their different colours, they’re all the same flavour. Butter cake with Almond/Orange icing.

I realized today that our local county fair started today. The Clark County fair, where I got my start in baking.

You see, back when I was an itty bitty little girl, my mom, my sister and I used to spend weeks and weeks in the kitchen during the month of July, In preparation of the baking booth at the Clark County fair. We’d all enter at least 5 entries each year, mostly jneverbashfulwithbutter.comhttp://www.neverbashfulwithbutter.comust to see what ribbons we could win, but it was also pretty cool when we ranked high enough to get a little money for our hard work.

I remember entering all sorts of goodies. Zucchini bread, spice cake, coconut macaroons, buttercreams, pound cake, cheesecake, chocolate chip cookies, sugar cookies… My mom always entered the specialized contests, like the decorated dummy cakes and the bread contests. My sister was in 4-H, so she had her own contests amongst the other 4-H’ers.

We’re going to try to go to the fair this coming week, so I might have photos from that if we end up going. In addition to that, I’m going to try and re-create some of those recipes that I made way back when. We’ll see. I’ve got a few of the actual original recipes on hand, and a few other ones that I’ve tweaked over the years.

And I still have that huge 5 gallon drum (with about 4 gallons still in it) of dessicated coconut, so.. coconut macaroons might just be something I have to make next week!

Also, I’d like to apologize for the lack of photos this week. We had a little family crisis (still in the midst of it, actually) so all extra activities were sort of shut down over the end of the week. I’m still dedicated to posting as often as I can, but things might be slow for the next week or so.  Please bear with me.

Also, My husband managed to eat my tarts and my ice cream BEFORE I could take photos of it. I’m thinking I need to get some post it notes and stick them to everything I make with a little note saying “Haven’t photographed yet” so it doesn’t happen again. Like I said though, we had a bit of an issue this week, so I didn’t mind so much, I’ve been sort of bogged down with other things.

Please keep The Muffin household in your pleasant thoughts and good graces over the next days and into the coming weeks. I’d really appreciate it.

Until then, I’ve got some cupcakes to give to my upstairs neighbours.

I’d like to say I used a different recipe, but I didn’t. I was kind of depressed today, so I figured some cupcakes would cheer me up, and I used one of my old family recipes.

Here it is-

Buttercake

1/2 cup butter, softened
2 eggs
1 cup sugar
1 1/2 cups sifted cake flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup sour cream
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/4 teaspoon almond extract

Preheat oven to 350 F degrees. Prepare your muffin tin with paper liners (or you could grease a cake pan)

Cream butter, and gradually add the sugar, creaming until light and fluffy. Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition.

In a separate bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder, soda, and salt. Add flour mixture alternately with milk and flavorings to creamed mixture, beating after each addition until smooth and light. Fill each cupcake paper about 3/4 of the way full. Bake for 15-20 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in center comes out clean. Allow to fully cool before icing.
Orange Almond Buttercream-

1 cup butter
6-8 cups powdered sugar
1/4- 1/2 cup milk
2 teaspoons almond extract
2 teaspoons orange extract

Cream the butter in a large mixing bowl. Gradually add 4 cups of the powdered sugar. Add more if the mixture is not crumbly. Stop when the mixture looks like pie crust dough. Add 1/4 cup of the milk and all of the flavouring extracts. whip on high speed until the mixture fluffs up. if the mixture looks too soft or liquidy, add the remaining powdered sugar by the cupfull. If the mixture looks too crumbly, add the remaining milk a tablespoon at a time.

Store the mixture at room temperature. Makes enough icing to cover at least 24 standard sized cupcakes, generously.

And there you have it. Simple cupcakes with a simple flavour, but still very delicious.

-A.