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10 expert tips for making great cupcakes
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Wow guests this summer with yummy, professional-looking cupcakes.
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By Catherine Dunwoody
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See what happens when two gal pals with matching sweet tooths and savvy business sense cook up a brilliant idea? Best friends (or BFFs) Heather White and Lori Joyce own Vancouver's Cupcakes mini-chain, with two busy bakery boutiques and a third to open this summer. A Canadian success story of the sweetest kind, these ladies love what they do, and it shows.
The pink and brown colour scheme of each Cupcakes shop started with a girly-sweet, nostalgic chocolate cupcake with pink buttercream frosting that has become Cupcakes' iconic treat.
A few years later and the tiered cake stands in the shops' windows and showcases are loaded up with a tempting variety of seasonal flavours and colours. You'll also find retro-inspired cakes for any celebration, including weddings.
The cupcake-making trend
Cupcakes' treats are available in the usual muffin-sizes, but the one-bite minis, for some, are the perfect, heavenly mouthful. Most cookware stores for do-it-yourselfers have caught onto the trend and carry both regular and mini cupcake tins for baking, plus the paper liners to size.
With backyard barbecues and picnics taking up your weekends this summer, how about baking up some cupcakes of your own? Get inspired by Cupcakes' seasonal favourites, like the Red Velvet, a cocoa infused vanilla cake in a surprising shade of bright red, topped with white creamcheese frosting, (Canada Day anyone?). Or, the Creamsicle, which is vanilla cake with orange butter cream frosting, finished with orange sugar crystals. Or go with seasonal fruit and make your own version of their Pearfection (pear buttercream with almond poppyseed cake).
Cupcakes are easy to transport too, just place them snugly in a flat, lidded container, with a bit of 'head room' for the frosting.
Here are 10 tips from the pros at Cupcakes for creating your own tasty cupcakes:
1. Make two different types of cake batter, say vanilla and chocolate. Add a blob of each flavour to each cake liner, mix briefly, bake and voila: marble cake!
2. Use a #12 ice cream scoop (available at cookware stores) to get equal cupcake batter portions into the liners before baking. Then the size and shape of each will be nice and consistent.
Click to continue for 8 more tips for perfecting your cupcakes...
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