Oh Cupcakes

I love sweets, especially cupcakes. Perhaps a little too much…don’t judge me. And you know what’s the worst thing about me loving cupcakes? It’s that I cannot master them in the kitchen. No matter how hard I try to conquer the art of baking cupcakes, I fail each time. The failures range from substantial to minimal, but they are still failures in my eyes. It seems pretty straight forward, right? Just follow the recipe and voila, you have beautifully risen, decorated mini-cakes. But alas, that does not work with me. In vain I try to make them as perfect as can be, in vain I try different icings, creams and methods. My cupcakes just never look like the ones in the store, or even on the picture. As much as I love cooking, baking is too finicky for me.

So why did I think that taking two gourmet cupcakes recipes and merging them into one would work? Who knows. But I did. And of course, I failed yet again. They tasted good, but the shape and presentation just was not there…it was so disappointing that I did not even take a picture of them. Don’t get me wrong, they weren’t UGLY, they were just sad…sad cupcakes destined for greatness but failing at my hand.

The idea was to make a mango cupcake with a mango butter-cream. The cupcake recipe was simple enough, but I decided to spice it up by adding sour cream and butter instead of oil. The end result was too soft of a batter, it was just too wet with the mango puree in it as well. They baked, but did not rise as expected. Then the butter-cream was also too ‘wet’. I used powdered sugar, and butter and decided to add mango puree to that as well. The frosting wasn’t thick enough and had chunks of mango in it, which needless to say, did not look appetizing. But I was just feeling tired and stubborn, so I went ahead and made them anyways. Frosted, decorated, set aside, ate one. Again, the taste was great, I just wish they looked better.

There is no recipe, since I declare this a fail, but here is the link for this awesome cupcake website http://mingmakescupcakes.yolasite.com/
I made cupcake number 18, but with mango puree not apricot jam, and I took the frosting from cupcake number 9, but added mango puree. Please enjoy making them, and know that failure is OK (even if you want to keep a grudge)