Hello! Here I am again, with some tasty treats.
To begin: On July 19th, 1974, in the great state of Colorado, was born my sister, Tina! Yay!
To celebrate Tina's birthday, we decided to have some foods and do a little shopping and eat cupcakes! This was on Sunday the 17th. It was sooooooo hot that day. Here in Northwest Wisconsin, we're just coming off a heat wave. It was hot, y'all. I am a delicate flower, so I do not do well in the heat. We have air conditioning, but we also live on the third floor, so our little window unit has a hard time keeping up with all of the heat from outside and the two floors below us.
So, what do do when it's really hot outside
and the air is having trouble keeping up?
Why, bake of course! (Yeah, I know. I'm a moron.)
I got this recipe from a website that called these beauties "White Velvet" cupcakes. In the description of the recipe, this person said that this was a cupcake that was just like a red-velvet cupcake, just without the red food coloring. Weeeeeeeeeellll, I don't necessarily agree with that. Whenever I've made red velvet cake, cupcakes or cookies, I have always included cocoa powder in the batter. Red Velvet cake is a lightly chocolate cake that is colored red. I have seen different recipes for Red Velvet that don't include chocolate, but I consider that to be sacrilege. I digress. The point is, I have decided to call these Vanilla Cupcakes. I know, not really very original, but it's what they are, folks.
My sister, Amanda, said that these cupcakes were like a sugar cookie in cupcake form. Deeeeeeelish.
I think that the part about using the kitchen scale to portion out equal amounts of batter is a great idea. I used 1.7 oz per cupcake and they all turned out the same size! Brilliant!
I didn't use the buttercream recipe on the page with the cupcakes, because I wasn't quite ready for the egg-yolk buttercream. I'll work up the courage eventually, but not now. Instead I used this recipe:
Vanilla Buttercream Frosting
1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, at room temperature
3-4 cups powdered sugar, SIFTED
1/4 tsp salt
1 Tbsp vanilla extract
up to 4 Tbsp milk or heavy cream
Beat the butter on medium speed of your mixer until light and fluffy. Add 3 cups powdered sugar and mix on low speed until incorporated. Increase speed to medium and add vanilla, salt and 2 Tbsp. milk and beat for 3 minutes. Add more sugar or milk as needed to achieve desired consistency.
Seriously, this frosting is AMAZING. I finally had to put dish soap in the bowl to keep myself from just wearing it on my head like a helmet and licking it clean. This made quite a lot of frosting, I had A LOT leftover, so you can either halve the recipe or store it in the freezer for the next time you make cupcakes or cookies or what have you.
Moving on, with it being so very, very hot, I decided last night to make cookies on my waffle iron. There is a story here, as well. When I was in junior high/high school, I had a friend named Lisa. Lisa Berg. I ate at her house a lot, and vice versa. Lisa's mom, Dot, used to make these chocolate waffle-iron cookies that were awesome! A little over a year ago, Lisa's family had a big Fourth of July party and I requested the waffle iron cookies! Saint Dot graciously consented to make them and they were just as awesome as I remember.
So, I decided to try some different kinds of waffle cookies. I found this recipe for Gualletes. They are French and oh so good. The recipe in the link is huge, so I decided to quarter it. I used: 1 stick of butter
3/4 cup of dark brown sugar (I use dark brown sugar almost exclusively, because it is tasty)
2 eggs
1 Tbsp vanilla extract (yeah, I didn't quarter this part. I loves me some vanilla.)
1 3/4 cups A.P. flour
1/4 tsp baking soda (no quartering here either. It's just silly when there is so little in it to begin with)
and 1/8 tsp salt.
I have a crappy $10 Wal-Mart waffle iron, and these cookies came out great. They were really good right off the waffle iron and even better the next day. They get way chewier and the vanilla and brown sugar combination is very good. I might make the whole recipe for Christmas cookies this year (after I've upgraded my waffle iron.) Here is a picture:
Sooooooo delicious. This is a good recipe for hot days when you don't want to turn the oven on. They're also nice because they bake in about 2 minutes. You have to stand over the waffle maker to switch them out, but I still think it's better than heating up the house.
Enjoy!
