Yesterday we were having some friends over for dinner. They have a sweet little four year old girl who loves the color pink almost as much as me. I had told her that when she came over to eat with us I would make her pink cupcakes. I am always looking for a reason to use my mixer!
I had decided that I was going to use a recipe from my America's Test Kitchen Cookbook. I have never made anything out of that book that we haven't loved.
I made the yellow cake with no issues at all. The cupcakes baked and came out perfect!
Then came the icing....The recipe had many steps. I was making essentially a French Buttercream. It is meant to be more of a whipped icing or even a meringue. There were a few things this recipe called for that I had never done.
The first step was to whip your eggs until nice and fluffy. While that is doing its thing you were to bring corn syrup and sugar to a boil. I had never done this and didn't realize how fast that stuff would cool and how hard it got upon cooling. Luckily I was able to add it to my egg mixture before that took place.
Adding this VERY hot liquid to your egg mixture is what cooks the eggs to the point of killing off all the bad bacteria.
Everything was still going great. I continued on adding in the vanilla and other incredients. It still looked like it was working fine.. The final step is adding in your room temprature butter a little at a time and letting it fluff. It being room temperature is very important. If it's to hard it won't incorporate.
This is where it started to look funny. It never really got to that silky smooth point that I was waiting for. I gave it a test taste and it tasted great...so why wouldn't it thicken up....I went ahead and finished the instructions and began to ice my cupcakes. The icing was very runny but did stay on the cake. I thought okay well maybe it will harden as it sits....
Our company cam and we finished diner. It was time for the cupcakes and I was very nervous. Why would I make a brand new recipe and then serve it to people other than Chris and the boys? Everyone had a cupcake and complimented me but I still feel something is wrong with the icing....
This continued to bug me. After our company left I got the cookbook back out and read the recipe over and over again. I had done everything like it said. What went wrong?
And then I saw it.....one little word in the ingredients that I missed. I had used 6 large eggs. The recipe said to use 6 large egg YOLKS! Who knew that those eggs whites could cause me so many issues.
The moral of this story is to read your directions VERY carefully. Read them again...and again and make sure your doing everything right.
The other lesson learned is to practice new recipes before you invite friends over to eat it! I'm just thankful it tasted okay! Thank you to M, K, and A for being so nice about my cupcake FAIL! I will have you over again soon and make the icing the right way.
Here is a picture of the finished cupcakes.
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