Vanilla Cupcakes

    Whenever I feel like baking something (which, let’s face it, is pretty much all the time) and ask my mom what she’s in the mood for, the conversation almost always goes like this:
Me: “Hey, mom, what do you want me to bake?”
Mom: “You’re making me fat.”
Me: “Yeah, yeah, yeah. What do you want?”
Mom: “I think I need to ban you from the kitchen.”
Me: “……”
Mom: “Cupcakes, please.”
    Remember this post a few weeks ago, with my go-to recipe for cupcakes? Well, now I have a new, even-better-than-those-cupcakes go-to recipe (I change my mind a lot, okay? Don’t judge me), and ever since the first time I made it, all my mom ever wants is cupcakes. Specifically, these cupcakes with vanilla frosting and nothing else. I can’t really blame her though, because these cupcakes really are delicious. Moist, delicious… mmm, I want another one (or two or ten). I’m pretty sure I would probably be snacking on one of these babies right now if we hadn’t finished the last of them this morning—that’s right, haven’t you heard that cupcakes are the new breakfast of champions? I mean… what? Anyway, if you’re in the market for a good cupcake recipe, you should give this one a try.



Yellow Cupcakes:
Adapted from Smitten Kitchen
Ingredients
4 cups plus 2 tablespoons cake flour (not self-rising)
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 ½ teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
2 sticks (1 cup) unsalted butter, softened
2 cups sugar
2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
4 large eggs, at room temperature
2 cups buttermilk, well-shaken

1. Preheat oven to 350°F. Line cupcake tins with paper liners, or spray with cooking spray.
2. Sift together flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in a medium bowl. In a large mixing bowl, beat butter and sugar with an electric mixer at medium speed until pale and fluffy, then beat in vanilla. Add eggs, one at a time, beating well and scraping down the bowl after each addition. At low speed, beat in buttermilk until just combined. Add flour mixture in three batches, mixing until each addition is just incorporated.
3. Fill cupcake tins 2/3 full. Bake until golden and a wooden pick inserted in center of cake comes out clean, 12-15 minutes (my oven cooks kind of weird, so this time may not be exact. Just watch closely to make sure they aren’t overcooked). Let pan cool slightly before removing cupcakes to cool on a wire rack (or, if you’re like me, remove cupcakes immediately and suffer the very hot consequences). Let cupcakes cool completely before frosting. Enjoy!

Yield: about 24 cupcakes

Fourth of July and Key Lime Pie

    Sorry for the mini-hiatus! My last few weeks have been insane… I spent the end of May and beginning of June in Boston. Then, less than a week after that I went on a two-week long road trip that started in Pennsylvania and ended back here in Florida (which included a stop at the newly-opened Wizarding World of Harry Potter in Universal Studio’s Islands of Adventure… I am a huge Harry Potter nerd, and seriously that place is amazing. I would live there if I could). Despite some major bumps along the way, all of which just HAD to happen on the same day-—like having the airport lose my luggage, getting pulled over repeatedly by police thinking we were doing illegal things (apparently we looked like hoodlums but we were really just lost, I swear!), and losing the keys to our van-—I had a blast. One major thing I missed, though, was being able to cook or bake. Within the first two hours of being home I had already baked a pie, and since then I’ve pretty much been baking and cooking nonstop.



    I’ve been excited for the Fourth of July for a while. The second my older sister told me that she wanted to have a party, I scoured the internet for ideas on what to make until I finally settled on a Key Lime pie. If there’s one good thing about living in Florida, it’s the availability of key limes. I’ve been seeing them for weeks now in all of my local grocery stores, and since I’ve never tasted a single key lime pie before, I was eager to bake one. It took about 21 limes to get the full half cup of juice needed for the pie. I hand-juiced all the limes and by the end of it, I was pretty sure my thumbs were going to fall off. The pie turned out to be pretty good and my parents really liked it, especially when served with fresh, homemade whipped cream. I would definitely make it again. Sorry about the lack of a good photograph-—when the pie had finished baking I put it in the fridge to set, but once the morning rolled around, it had already been cut into and demolished.
    In addition to the Key Lime pie, I wanted to make something patriotic, and what better to make then red and blue cupcakes with vanilla frosting? The cupcakes were sooo good, even though I over-mixed them when trying to get the shades of red and blue just right. A few weeks ago, I posted about finally having a good go-to cupcake recipe. Since then, I’ve found an even better recipe—one that is now my go-to. You can (and should!) check out the recipe for those here. Once the last of the flour was barely mixed into the cupcake batter, I divided the mix in half and added red and blue Wilton gel colors until I achieved a good shade. I layered the colored batter into the tins, and topped them with a simple vanilla frosting. I halved the recipe and made about 32 mini cupcakes, and all of them were gone in less than 24 hours. Seriously, they were that cute and addicting.



Key Lime Pie
Adapted from these two recipes

Ingredients:
1 ¼ cups graham cracker crumbs
5 tbsp butter, melted
4 large egg yolks
14 oz. can sweetened condensed milk
1 tbs grated key lime zest
1/2 cup fresh key lime juice

1. Preheat your oven to 350°F.
2. Crust: place the graham cracker crumbs in a bowl and add the melted butter. Mix to combine, then press the crumbs evenly over the bottom of a 9 inch pie pan. Bake for 8 minutes and let cool.
3. Filling: mix together sweetened condensed milk and egg yolks with a whisk until combined. Add in lime juice and zest and whisk again until thoroughly combined. Pour filling mixture into cooled crust. Bake on a rack in the middle of the oven for 15 minutes. Cool pie on a wire rack and then chill for at least 6-8 hours or overnight. Serve with homemade whipped cream.