It happens to all of us I hear.... Actually it happens to me... a lot. However, I do love baking and I realize that there will most certainly be failures along the way.
A co-worker was having a birthday and I wanted to make her some cupcakes. I decided to make vanilla bean cupcakes with strawberry buttercream. I had found a recipe for this frosting and it looked amazing.
The cupcakes were "cake" to make. No issues there. I do tend to overfill my cupcake liners and I really must start paying more attention there, but I digress.
I followed the buttercream recipe exactly. I pureed my strawberries and jam together and I thought that it seemed like an awful lot of liquid to add to buttercream. Because we all know that the ratio of butter to sugar to liquid is pretty close in most recipes.
Nevertheless, I figured this recipe had to be correct. And it failed... all over the place. Literally. The buttercream was soup. I added more sugar and more sugar. At that point I figured out why my dentist loved me so much. And loved the college tuition I was funding for his children....and grandchildren.
I finally had to stop. I was worried that the frosting would be over the top sweet. So I had to deal with runny frosting. It did drip a little over the edges on some of the cupcakes.
Luckily, the frosting still did taste great. The strawberry flavor was incredible. And my co-workers still liked the cupcakes and ate them all. I love them.... I bet they would have told me that they tasted great no matter what.
Lesson learned- trust your instincts. I knew that there was too much liquid and I was correct. I also learned that some recipes out there may not really be "kitchen tested" because there is no way that this buttercream would have turned out. Oh well.
Luckily, I have a dozen or so cupcake and frosting recipes that I still want to try and all of them come from baking blogs I know and trust. I hope to share some more successes with you and even if they are failures I am not shy.
Happy May to everyone and enjoy the beautiful weather!
Marci
Ummm...these were definitely NOT failures! They were awesome. I think that frosting was so wonderful. If you didn't like it up on top though...what about punching a whole and putting on the inside and then frosting it with something else....Ooooh how about a banana cupcake with that inside and then chocolate frosting (a banana split cupcake)???
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