A cupcake recipe

As an answer to my cupcake dilemma from last week, I noticed a cupcake recipe in the saturday magazine of our newspaper.

Gwen Thomas, an American woman living in Amsterdam, bakes cupcakes to order for us Dutch people who just don’t seem to grasp the concept of a cupcake (even though we do appreciate a good cupcake.

The article mentions that most Dutch people indeed seem to think that a cupcake is a decorated muffin. To prove us wrong Gwen shows the journalist interviewing her a picture from the book I’m just here for more food written by Alton Brown. This shows that cupcakes do not have a “hat” and that the airbubbles inside a cupcake are all the same size, while those in a muffin differ in size.

For Gwen it turned out to be difficult to make cupcakes according to Martha Stewards recipe without all the American ingredients, so she decided to experiment with Dutch ingredients and she changed her weighing method: instead of cups she started weighing with scales, just like we do ;-)

The recipe she shared with the newspaper was a recipe for Vanilla Cupcakes, made with her own vanilla extract (vanilla pods which have been floating in vodka since the 24th of may):

Gwen’s Vanilla Cupcakes

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(adapted from Martha Steward’s “Billy’s Vanilla, Vanilla Cupcakes”) 

Ingredients

• 98,5 grams of butter
• 6 grams of vanilla extract 
• 174 grams of sugar 
• 113 grams of milk 
• 186 grams of all purpose flour 
• one eighth teaspoon of salt 
• 10 grams of double acting baking powder 
• 2 egg whites 

For the frosting

• 85 grams of soft butter 
• 140 grams of powdered sugar 
• milk 
• 1 drop of vanilla extract 
• food colouring 

Method
1. Preheat oven to 175-180 degrees. Line cupcake pans with paper liners; set aside.
2. Mix the butter with an electric whisk, slowly add the sugar and keep whisking until the mixture goes white. Stir the vanilla in the milk.
3. Sieve the American flour, the salt and baking powder three times. Alternately add the flour mixture in three parts and the milk in two parts to the butter and mix well. With mixer on medium speed, add wet ingredients in 3 parts, scraping down sides of bowl before each addition; beat until ingredients are incorporated but do not overbeat.
4. Whisk the egg whites in a clean bowl until you get soft peaks, it does not need to stiffen up. Fold the egg whites through the batter.
5. Divide batter evenly among liners, filling about 2/3 full.
6. Bake, rotating pan halfway through, until a cake tester inserted in the center comes out clean, 17 to 20 minutes.
7. For the frosting: mix the sugar in portions with the butter. Add the vanilla and food colouring, if desired. If necessary add some milk to make the frosting thinner. Once cupcakes have cooled, use a small offset spatula to frost tops of each cupcake.