White Cupcakes with Vanilla Frosting

Taking pictures for this blog can be an adventure. First off, I use a point-and-shoot camera. It's not really that bad. What's hard is finding a good spot in our house that has a lot of natural light.

Yesterday, I baked white cupcakes with vanilla frosting. It was a bit cloudy and the light present was less than ideal. All my pictures were dark. So I decided to head out to the garage and take pictures there. I also brought a piece of bond paper to serve as my background. Cute craft papers is something I should really buy.

Most of the time, my picture-taking skillz are non-existent. A lot of things that are not supposed to be in the shot is included. Sometimes my hand makes a guest appearance and then an otherwise good shot is ruined. I'm still practicing and I'm hoping that practice does really make you better.

But what I didn't expect when I took these pictures was our dogs wanting to eat the cupcakes. It become hard to take shots of cupcakes while trying to fend off hungry dogs so I called for reinforcements. My sister came and distracted the dogs while I quickly took pictures.

The brown one is Kokoy (don't ask me about the name, I don't know either) and the other is Bobby. Bobby was not that really interested in the food he just wanted to be held. Kokoy, on the other hand, was a crazy one. He did everything to get to eat the cupcakes. He was jumping, running and escaping from my sister so I also needed to be on guard most of the time.

In the end, though, the cupcakes made it without any casualties.

My cupcakes turned out dense. It's not really the recipe's fault. I was being stupid and used a way too small bowl for four eggwhites. The top part was already at stiff peaks but when I was ready to fold it into the batter it was still liquid at the bottom. I didn't want to wash the beaters again so I just left it as is. The cupcake still tasted delicious though.

Oh, about the 200 cupcakes and 200 cookies we baked, as you can see, I'm still alive :o I'm really grateful for my cousins' help because otherwise I would've gone crazy. And it also helped that I pre-measured the dry ingredients during the week.

Snow White Vanilla Birthday Cake

From Sweetapolita

Ingredients:

1/2 cup butter

2 cups white sugar

3 1/2 cups flour

1 teaspoon salt

3 teaspoons baking powder

1 1/2 cups ice water

1 teaspoon vanilla

1/2 teaspoon almond extract

4 egg whites beaten stiff

Method:

Add sugar to the butter and beat until light. Sift dry ingredients and add alternately with ice water and flavourings, beating thoroughly after each addition. Fold in the beaten egg whites. Pour into greased layer pans and bake at 350 degrees for about 20 minutes.

That’s the Best Frosting I’ve Ever Had (I halved this)

From Tasty Kitchen

5 Tablespoons Flour

1 cup Milk

1 teaspoon Vanilla

1 cup Butter

1 cup Granulated Sugar (not Powdered Sugar!)

In a small saucepan, whisk flour into milk and heat, stirring constantly, until it thickens. You want it to be very thick, thicker than cake mix, more like a brownie mix is. Remove from heat and let it cool to room temperature. It must be completely cool before you use it in the next step. Stir in vanilla.

While the mixture is cooling, cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy. You don’t want any sugar graininess left. Then add the completely cooled milk/flour/vanilla mixture and beat the living daylights out of it. If it looks separated, you haven’t beaten it enough! Beat it until it all combines and resembles whipped cream.