Recipe: Basic Vanilla Cupcakes by Ricardo Cuisine
The holiday season inspires a lot of people to bake delicious goods… and the elf and I are apparently no different. Today, we tested out a recipe by Ricardo for some cupcakes and below you’ll find out how well we did and what advice we would recommend to yield the best results.
Before we started we made sure that we had all the items that we would need:
Ingredients:
- 1 ¾ cups of unbleached all-purpose flour
- 7, 1 ½ teaspoons of baking powder
- ¼ teaspoon of Salt
- ¾ of unsalted butter, softened
- 1 cup of sugar
- 1 ½ teaspoons of vanilla extract
- 3 eggs at room temperature
- ½ cup of milk
Then in one mixing bowl we combined the flour, baking powder, and the salt. Which was easy enough.
In another bowl, we mixed together the butter (I microwaved it to make it soft), the sugar, and the vanilla extract. You can use an electric mixer to do this…but I decided to go it old school and use a whisk. I don’t feel like there would have been much of difference had I used one over the other, so go ahead with whatever you’re most comfortable with.
I forgot to take a picture of the sugar… and a couple of other ingredients (whoops) so let’s use our imaginations shall we!
Once that was mixed together we added one egg at a time before mixing in the dry ingredients that we had set, and the milk. To make sure all the ingredients mixed well without clumping, we alternated between adding milk and the dry ingredients as the recipe suggested.
Yup… totally simple and not complicated at all. And if you’ve done everything right you should have made just enough batter for about 18-24 cupcakes.
Now, if you’re not a baker, which I’m not (total novice over here)… I would suggest only filling your cupcake molds halfway because they will rise and if they have nothing to rise to…they’ll end up looking like this:
My second batch turned out much more cupcake like! So the recipe works really well if you know what not to do. (Bake them at 350 degrees Fahrenheit)
Anyway, once we had the cupcakes ready to go, we decided to decorate them using another recipe by Ricardo for vanilla frosting.
To make this type of frosting all you need are the following:
Ingredients:
- ¾ cup of unsalted butter, softened
- 2 ¼ cup of icing sugar
- 2 tablespoons of 35% whipping cream
- 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract
And that’s basically it. You put all of these ingredients into a bowl and you mix it. I used the same method for the butter as I did earlier (I microwaved it in case you skipped reading that bit) and added a little more vanilla extract than required (personal choice you can add as much as you’d like) and viola! I had my frosting.
Overall, the recipe for the cupcakes was excellent and it definitely tasted a lot better than I expected–especially for a non-baker and an elf! ;). However, I might recommend trying a different frosting recipe as I felt the consistency of this one to be a tad runny. Of course it tasted great, but if you want that Cupcakes Girls style frosting I would suggest going with a meringue frosting or whatever works best for the style your looking for.
To try more Ricardo Cuisine recipes you can visit the Ricardo website here: www.ricardocuisine.com
-@GirlontheProwl
GirlontheProwl 