s someone who is an avid baker and known cupcake aficionado, I have amassed a fairly impressive collection of cupcake cookbooks. While I have turned to each of them at some point, there's only one I go to with absolute faith in the results: Martha Stewart's Cupcakes.
To be honest, Martha Stewart bugs me. Big time. Not only can she apparently do it all - cook, sew, keep a garden, get out impossible stains - but she can do it all perfectly. Hello, irritating much..? There's no way that all her recipes/crafts/ideas are all 100% hers. No one is that perfect. I suppose there was that stint in jail... But really, I just can't fight her on the recipes, and her cupcakes are no exception.
Last week I was craving chocolate something fierce (and strangely had been for almost a month straight - and no, I'm NOT pregnant) and a mini Snickers here and there just wasn't cutting it. I needed something GOOD. I needed cupcakes. Homemade cupcakes. So I turned to my favorite: Martha's yellow buttermilk cupcakes with dark chocolate frosting - and don't forget the sprinkles, otherwise it's just not the same. The cake is an excellent substitute for my very favorite - yellow cake mix from the States - and the chocolate frosting is nothing short of heavenly. I warn you, the frosting is not very stiff, so it's really best suited for cupcakes, and the amount of the recipe will seriously feed an army. Or two. Don't say I didn't warn you.
Just the cake part of the recipe made a boatload (really just because I was too lazy to figure out how to halve odd numbers of eggs), meaning my husband's office got some, our friends down the street got some, even the downstairs neighbor, for whom I had just taken in a package marked all over with 'Happy Birthday!', got some. Somehow though, I was still shoveling them in two or three in a sitting for days.
Oh Martha, you just don't know how to disappoint, do you..?
Daily Drop Cap by Jessica Hische
