V-Day Cupcake Success

Photo Credit: Vanessa Mei

Fortunately, due to the snow, we students were able to have a blissfully relaxing mini-vacation before another long week at school. We planned to bake on Monday, and since we had a day off on that day as well, I decided to grab the ingredients from my local grocery store before heading to Zhou’s house, as he was unable to go by himself (it was his turn to buy the ingredients) since he would have to bring his little sister and walk on the treacherous and slippery sidewalk. I bought french vanilla cake mix, milk and white chocolate chips, decorating tips, a variety of sprinkles, white frosting, plastic bags (as I forgot to bring some of mine’s at home), light and dark pink cupcake liners, a cupcake pan, and red and pink gel (an alternative to the food dye because they did not carry it in the stores). Afterwards, when I came over, we thoroughly washed our hands before rinsing the cupcake pan. Zhou’s little sister wanted to help with the process of making the Valentine’s Day treats, which I thought was a great idea (not that we were too lazy to do some of the parts) because it would be a great experience for her to experiment, try new things, and find out if she has a passion/an interest for baking in general.

Photo Credit: Vanessa Mei

After a fulfilled promise that she would wash her hands and be extra careful, she was given the privilege of lining the pan with the cupcake cups; six light pink ones and six metallic pink ones. We then remembered to turn on the oven for preheating before beginning to make the cake mix, incorporating the three eggs and one cup of water into the powder in a large bowl. I carefully folded the eggs and water into the mix, making sure that the dry powder was mostly incorporated into the wet ingredients (to ensure the least amount of box mix spillage as possible) before handing it over to his little sister, who stood right next to me and begged for a chance to stir. Luckily, she had only made a little mess on the table, and she slowly mixed as I poured in the ½ cup of oil. Once that had been successfully accomplished, I gave Zhou, who had become the food photographer and the clueless guy in the back who stood back and observed, the task of spooning the mixture into the liners. Since he did not have much of an experience with baking, he was quite confused at what I was trying to make him do, and once I had physically shown him how to use two spoons to scoop the batter into the cupcake tins, Zhou finally got to work. Since we did not realize that we didn’t have English class the next day, and we were worried that the cupcakes might go stale, we decided to opt for our backup plan, which was to hand them out to our friends and peers. Due to this, we chose to only make 12 cupcakes (although if we did make them for the class we would’ve definitely had to make at least 2 batches), hence my “genius” idea to use up all the batter. However, once we had poured most of the mix into the 12 liners, Zhou pointed out that since we had used the entire box, we should have at least half of the mixture leftover (24 cupcakes could be made from the batter of one box). Once I realized this, I didn’t want to scoop back the mixture into the bowl, so we went with the flow and popped them into the oven for 15 minutes at 350 degrees.

Photo Credit: Zhou 

While they were baking in the oven (I was completely intoxicated by the heavenly vanilla scent whenever I was in the kitchen) we got to work with the designing. Using the idea from the video I had watched earlier last week, we thought that it would be pretty cool and a great experience to learn new techniques; piping chocolate designs for the toppings. First we found and printed out pictures/words we wanted to use (XOXO, hearts, love, etc.) and placed them underneath a large sheet of parchment paper on a flat surface, using heavy things such as the chocolate bag to hold down the corners. Zhou and I melted about ¼ of each of the white and milk chocolate bags separated into two bowls in the microwave for about 50 seconds. I initially thought that this would be quite easy, as I have piped frosting before using plastic bags, but this time it was difficult.

We immediately ran into a problem, as I had initially thought that it would be fine to use one of the tips and stick it through a hole in one of the corners of the plastic bags, but unfortunately it wasn’t as easy as I had assumed it to be. The first problem was that we spooned the chocolate into the bags, but forgot to turn them inside out before placing the melted chips inside. That was not a good idea, because the chocolate would run down the sides of the bag, and when we tried to push the chocolate down to the corner where the piping tip was, a trail of precious chocolate was left behind as we pushed it down, which meant that we had wasted a good amount of chocolate that we could have used for the designs. Also, the tip was not cooperating with the bag, and we struggled making out the letters of XOXO. We ended up giving up and threw our DIY piping bag away. Zhou then attempted some more designs using a new bag (they weren’t too bad) with the milk chocolate, while I started working with the white chocolate on a separate piece of parchment paper. I soon remembered the tip of flipping the bag inside out and placing the chocolate right next to the corner of the bag, but by then the white chocolate had already hardened (it hardens faster than milk chocolate). I popped it into the microwave for around 30-40 seconds before properly scooping the chips into the bags. I allowed all the air to escape the bag before twisting the end tightly and snipping a tiny bit of the tip off.

This time, success came! I created XOXO (hugs and kisses) smoothly, and I quickly continued to make as many designs as I could before I lost my amazing chocolate piping ability. Zhou had made about four or five designs before giving up and started coloring the frosting using the gel. His little sister helped him mix in both the red and pink gels to create different shades of pink for the tops of the cupcakes while I made hearts and love words out of chocolate. Once that was done, we thought that it would be fine to leave them out at room temperature, but later on it turns out that they were still flimsy and not completely hardened, so we had to place them into the fridge. During this moment, the timer indicated that the cupcakes were done, and they looked pretty good if you asked me. Using two towels to lift them out of the oven to cool off, Zhou pointed out our mistake of using too much batter for each cupcake, since they were quite puffed up. I assured him that it would be fine, and that we could conceal our problem with a layer of sickenly-sweet frosting. Once they had cooled off, we carefully took them out of the tray and saw that they had a very large muffin top, which we covered by frosting them using spoons (as we deemed the plastic tips useless).

Photo Credit: Zhou

After frosting two of the cupcakes, Zhou complained (or complemented?) that I was much better at frosting them, and left me with the tedious task. He retreated to his room to continue working on his last-minute outline while his chatty sister amused me during the process. I let her frost her own cupcake (Zhou also ate one so we had a total of 10 cupcakes to give away the next day) to keep her quiet while I heavily concentrated on perfecting the sugary creations. I tried to create a marbling effect using the gels and white frosting, but it did not go as well as I had expected and most of them had just one simple shade of pink. After the cupcakes looked at least semi-decent (mediocre in my eyes) I gave into Zhou’s sister’s constant begging to take the responsibility of decorating the tops using a wide range of pink and white sprinkles. Thanks to Zhou’s warning to not give her the sprinkles container (“you’re gonna spill it everywhere and then we’ll have to clean it!”) I gave her a small portion of the sprinkles and strictly told her to drop the bits at least one to two inches above the cupcakes. I joined in on the fun, and within fifteen minutes we had completed them! All that was left were the chocolate toppings, which I placed on a few hours later after they had hardened in the fridge. Because of the overfilled cupcakes, it was difficult to get them out of the pan, and it would be extremely messy if we placed them back into the tray and had to take them out for people to taste, so I ripped a sheet of parchment paper into squares and placed them on top of the cupcake tray holes. Then I inserted the cupcakes on top of the parchment paper and into the holes so that it would be easier for Zhou to hand them out the next morning. The entire process took about three to four hours. I never realized how time-consuming it was to bake something so simple as cupcakes.

Photo Credit: Shannon

Zhou brought in the cupcakes the next day, and he handed them out to his friends and peers. Due to the fact that we did not have many classes together that day, I was not there to witness their judgements and opinions. Zhou told me that they said the frosting was too sweet, and the bottom part of the cupcake easily collapsed, as the top was too heavy. This was most likely the factor of adding too much cake mix, which is something that we will keep in mind next time we make something relatively similar to cupcakes. However, it did taste good in general, which made me feel better about spending so long on baking them.

Photo Credit: Shannon