funfetti birthday cupcakes

This week, my baking project was another throwback to childhood: the funfetti cupcake. My friend Joe’s 32nd birthday was yesterday, so for his birthday party, I decided I would bake a batch of cupcakes for everyone to enjoy while we were out at the bar. I perused the aisle at my local grocery store earlier in the week to see what the cake selection looked like and spotted the funfetti mix – classic yellow cake that’s freckled with rainbow-colored sprinkles in the mix. For those unfamiliar with this particular phenomenon – and seriously, shame on you – it makes your cake look as though it’s dotted with little rainbow fireworks inside. It’s very cute – perfect for the next birthday cake you want to bake for the under-10 set. Or in my case, the early-30s set.

Joe is a good friend that I met almost 3 years ago and one of the few people I know who truly revels in celebrating his birthday. I wanted to do something really special, so I cleared the funfetti cupcake idea with him (he was thrilled, called the selection “perfect”) and agreed with his suggestion that a simple vanilla frosting would be the best compliment to the rainbow-tinged cupcakes. Since my goal is to eventually get away from using store-made products, I set out to find an appropriate frosting recipe that I could make by myself. I settled on the “Silky Vanilla Butter Frosting” from my Good Housekeeping Cookbook.

Now, dear reader, I recognize that you are possibly shaking your head and thinking to yourself, “But Jon, wouldn’t it be easier to make homemade cupcakes and use store-bought frosting, instead of the other way around? You’d still get away from using mixes for everything while not stressing yourself out to the max at the same time!” While I agree, I don’t exactly know how one would do a homemade funfetti mix, and was more than willing to let the fine folks at Duncan Hines figure that out for me.

I started baking by following the instructions on the back of the cake mix and using my brand new hand-mixer! My note to self in last week’s blog posting inspired some charity on the part of my Mom, who offered to fund my electric-mixing dreams. Thanks, Mom!

When I pulled out the cupcake/muffin pans that I had bought a few years back, I realized that I had two mini-muffin pans and one regular-sized pan though I had originally thought it was the other way around. Suddenly, I realized I’d possibly have to do the cupcakes in two batches instead of just one, which could have posed some problems, but I figured I’d confront that problem if I came to it.

And come to it I did, but in all honesty, the cupcakes posed very few problems to me at all. The mix called for 18 or so minutes to bake the regular-sized cupcakes, so I figured I’d check on my minis around the 15-minute mark. Some of them got a little overdone, but for the most part they were fine. Next time, I’m checking on them at 12 minutes instead.

After the first batch of cupcakes went into the oven, I started working on the frosting. The ingredients were as follows:

1 cup sugar
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1&1/3 cups milk
2 sticks softened butter
1 tablespoon vanilla extract

The recipe instructed me to mix the sugar and flour together and then whisk the milk into them slowly. Afterwards, the mixture would be brought to a boil, and then cooked for two minutes. It sounded a little similar to making a roux, something I’ve done a few times before, even though I still find a roux to be a little intimidating. It’s not a technique that came with my degree from the Cooking School of Mom, and certainly not something I do often.

I steeled myself to attack the frosting-making with sheer nerve – flying blind like this and trying something new in the kitchen can be really scary. After I measured out the flour and sugar and combined them, I tried measuring out the milk, only to have a good quarter of a cup of milk get away from me and splatter all over the floor. I pride myself on the fact that I don’t often have a lot of messes in the kitchen. I keep a fairly clean workspace and very rarely get prep ingredients on the floor. As I stared down at the puddle of milk spreading across my kitchen, I started to lose my cool. But that old adage, “Don’t cry over spilled milk” saved my mood. I slowly whisked in the milk as instructed and left the floor as it was for the moment.

Once the milk/flour/sugar recipe was fully combined, I turned on the heat. I felt a little led astray by the writers of the cookbook, because when they say “stirring constantly” what they really mean is “don’t stop stirring to do a single other thing for the entire time it takes to boil and cook this mixture.” After I turned the heat on under the saucepan, I quickly cleaned up the floor and washed my hands. When I returned to the stove, I found the gooey concoction was beginning to stick to the bottom of my saucepan. This was frustrating because the last thing I wanted to do was burn the homemade frosting, run out and buy the store-bought stuff, and then hang my head in shame. So I focused all my energy into keeping the mixture moving.

A few air bubbles started to pop through the top surface of the mixture, which had become incredibly gluey, so I lowered the heat as much as I could and kept stirring. My arm felt like it was about to fall off. The next time someone makes a new year’s resolution to exercise more, but isn’t really the gym type, recommend making homemade frosting to them. After the frosting mixture heated for a few minutes, it needed to cool completely before being mixed in with the butter and vanilla extract (I’m assuming so that it doesn’t just melt the butter, but instead helps the butter retain its soft fluffyness). I put the frosting into a small bowl and placed it to the side, happy to no longer have to work with the “Silky Vanilla Butter Frosting,” or as I had now renamed it, “Condensed Evil.”

I pulled out the first batch of cupcakes and set them out to cool down, knowing that one cannot frost warm cupcakes. I even set up an impromptu baking rack for the regular-sized cupcakes by placing the wire tray from my toaster oven across on of the burners on my range. I felt very proud of myself for this moment of minor ingenuity.

I then had to fill up my one regular-sized cupcake tray for round two of baking and threw that batch into the oven, happy to have a break from having to watch or stir something. Good thing I don’t keep alcohol in my apartment, or the second half of this baking project might have been completed while tipsy. Seriously, frosting is stressful!

After the frosting mixture and the cupcakes had both cooled down, I set out to finish the frosting. I whipped up the butter to make it light and fluffy and added the milk/sugar/flour mixture in a few stages to the butter. When it was all thoroughly combined and the vanilla extract was mixed in as well, I wasn’t exactly thrilled with the texture of the frosting. It looked lumpy and was just too limp to hold on to the top of the cupcakes, especially the minis. Though the recipe doesn’t say you can do it, I decided I’d cover the frosting with some plastic wrap and toss it in the fridge for about 10 minutes, figuring that would help firm it up. It worked perfectly. The frosting that came out of the fridge was the exact texture and consistency I was looking for. It spread well onto the cupcakes and looked great. I did my best with frosting the cupcakes, wishing that I had a piping bag so I could make them look even more professional. Maybe some day.

Last complaint about the frosting: there was way too much left over. What am I going to do with all of this? I hate wasting stuff when I’m cooking!

Once the cupcakes were thoroughly frosted and ready to go, I boxed them up and covered them with some tinfoil to protect them on the bus ride over to the bar. The weather forecast said there could be snow, and the last thing I wanted was for these cupcakes to be ruined after I stressed myself so much over them. As the bus slowly made its way through Greenpoint, I thought about my friend Ashley, who is such a devoted baker and Martha Stewart aficionado that she has a special carrier just for cupcakes that’s part of Martha’s collection of home goods from Macy’s. It’s a spectacular piece of kitchen ingenuity, but it’s just not how we run things in Brooklyn – cardboard ditto-box lid and tinfoil is how we roll.

That’s it for tonight! Hope you enjoyed this week’s post. Be on the lookout for my post about how the cupcakes turned out once we got to the party. The drama did not end in the kitchen this week!

grandma's crumb cake: the taste test

This recipe worked really well for the most part and I was very satisfied with the results. On Monday, I brought some of the crumb cake with me to my office. The response from my coworkers was very positive and everyone told me it was really delicious. I was a fan of the crumb cake as well, but I'm also my own worst critic, so I had two small complaints.

My first complaint was that I found the cake to be a little too fluffy for my own preferences. When I tried a piece Saturday night after the crumb cake cooled it was falling apart in my hands. However, by Monday afternoon when I had my second piece, the cake was now a little denser. By that time, it had been in its Tupperwear container for two days and I think some of the butter from the crumbs had seeped down into the cake. Maybe the key to this crumb cake is to make it ahead of time. If it’s to be served to guests at brunch, go ahead and bake it the night before so it has some time to settle afterwards. Also, I felt the crumbs had too much of a strong taste of cinnamon. Perhaps the powdered sugar I had accidentally overlooked would have cut that flavor, or perhaps next time, I’ll just cut back a tad on the cinnamon.

Besides those two minor criticisms, the cake was delicious and having it reminded me of Sunday morning visits to my grandparents' house. I think Grandma would be very proud.

grandma's crumb cake

My first project is a favorite treat of mine from childhood that is associated with my maternal grandmother, Angie Degennaro. Grandma is 92 years old, which means she was born in this wonderful borough of Brooklyn in 1918. She lived in Bensonhurst until the mid-1950s when she and my grandfather moved their two daughters out to Lindenhurst on Long Island.

Her crumb cake recipe comes from a spiral-bound cookbook called “Our Family Recipes,” a collection of family specialties and favorites that was compiled by my cousin, Patty Ruvolo, back in 1991. Grandma gave me a copy of the recipe book after my grandfather, Guido, passed away and she cleared all their possessions out of the house in Lindenhurst so she could move in with my Aunt Pam in West Babylon. The cookbook looks like it was put together using the old program The Print Shop and printed at home on a dot-matrix printer. Each recipe comes with the name of the person who submitted it to the cookbook, and quite a few stains from where a splash of something got away from my grandmother in the kitchen. There are lots of Degennaros, Ruvolos, Critellis and others in the pages of this book, which also contains the very coveted recipes for my Mom’s linzer tarts and my great-aunt Olga’s cream puff shells – both recipes I will be attempting later in the year.

This crumb cake recipe was not actually submitted by Grandma, but my cousin Virginia “Ginger” Degennaro. I picked it as my first project for it’s sentimental value and the fact that it utilizes store-bought yellow cake mix. Since this one is not a closely-kept family secret, nor is it the property of a published author, I figured I would post this one in full, something I might not be able to do each week.

1 box yellow cake mix

            - prepare as directed and bake in 13 x 9 pan.

Mix     2c flour

            2/3c sugar

            2t cinnamon

            2 sticks melted butter

            1t vanilla

When cake is 2/3 done or golden on top. Crumble mixture on top. Finish baking. Sprinkle powered sugar on top.

The tossing aside of traditional recipe-writing in a step-by-step fashion combined with the spelling mistake of “powered” sugar made it absolutely necessary that I post Ginger’s recipe verbatim here.

I started with the yellow cake, and following the instructions on the back of the box, I combined the cake mix with eggs, vegetable oil and water. I got this:

Then the recipe called for me to beat the mixture together for 30 seconds using the electric beater that I don’t have. Luckily, I have like 5 whisks, so steeling myself against the coming pain of a sore wrist, I grabbed my nearest whisk and started working that cake mix together like no one’s business. Ten seconds later, my wrist hurt so much that I wanted to cry, but my mixture was lumpy and very unappealing-looking, so I soldiered on and eventually got the mixture as lump-free as possible. Note to self: get an electric mixer.

I grabbed one of my glass 13 x 9 baking pans and promptly poured the contents of the bowl into the baking pan. As I was scraping the last few drizzles out of the bowl, I realized I had forgotten to grease the bottom of the baking dish – shoot! Now I was faced with the choice of dumping the batter back into the bowl, cleaning out the baking dish, and either drying the baking dish by hand and then greasing it, or leaving it to dry in my drying rack while greasing my other baking dish and pouring the batter into that one. I decided to leave the batter where it was and worry about all the unnecessary cleanup for after I had some crumb cake. I figured it’s a glass baking dish, the cleanup won’t be as awful as if I’d used a metal one. Note to self: don’t get flustered trying to take pictures for your blog posts when baking so that you miss crucial steps that will save you trouble later.

I should clarify that yes, I do have two 13 x 9 glass baking pans and no electric mixer. Hey, someday I might need to make two pans of lasagna at once, right?

Moving along, the cake went into the oven and I started on making the crumbs. This required melting two whole sticks of butter, which I decided to do on my stove because I feel like butter splatters way too much whenever I’ve melted it in the microwave and results in lots of extra cleanup. So I put the two whole sticks on the lowest setting and let them melt away while I measured out and combined the other crumb ingredients in a separate bowl.

mmmm... feel that heart attack building now

After I poured the butter into the other crumb ingredients, I was met with the conundrum of what utensil to use to mix the ingredients together, and settled on a fork. I think it worked pretty well.

By this time, the cake was still a good 10 minutes away from being crumb-ready, so I set the crumbs aside and did a little bit of cleanup. One of my mom’s cardinal rules of the kitchen was that we always clean up as we go along, a lesson that has served me quite well in the many years since I first learned it. When my timer went off, I noticed that the butter had separated a little bit from the rest of the crumb ingredients, so I gave them another quick mix before I pulled the cake out. The cake was not quite set and just starting to get golden on top, so my timing was on and I started crumbing the top of the cake. This process took longer than I thought it would, but eventually I got the whole cake covered and placed it back into the oven to finish off. When the timer went off again to signal the end of the baking, I took a look at the cake and it appeared as though the crumbs were still a little too moist, so I left the cake in for a few additional minutes.

After I pulled it out of the oven for good, I let the crumb cake rest for about 10 minutes before carving it up into big squares. I couldn’t resist a piece, so I had it as dessert. And since the powdered sugar was not listed with the other ingredients for the recipe, I neglected to pick it up at the grocery store. So the cake is without powdered sugar, but it's probably a blessing since trying to sprinkle it on top of the cake would have made a huge mess I'm sure.

So, that’s how it all went down on Saturday. I am bringing in some of the crumb cake to work for my coworkers and will post in a few days what their and my reactions were.

Thanks for reading!

- Jon

first! an introduction

Welcome to my blog, a boy bakes in brooklyn. I’ve started this blog to document my attempt to become more comfortable and competent while baking. I consider myself pretty skilled when it comes to cooking, but baking has always felt like a completely different process altogether. It includes lots of additional hardware and gadgets that the limited space in my one-bedroom apartment and the budget from the salary at my low-level corporate job just don’t allow. Baking requires exact measurements and sometimes, exact processes, like whipping egg whites to a proper consistency or folding said egg whites into another mixture. The idea that the smallest misstep while baking can completely destroy an entire project is daunting and also one of the reasons I’ve stayed away in the past.

But no more.

There are too many people in my life who bake well, and I am determined to become a member of that group. My plan is to spend each Saturday this year baking. I’ll blog about my experience on Sundays and report back later in the week with results from my taste-testers. I plan on starting with some very simple recipes using pre-mixes or other shortcuts, but my intention is to eventually move away from these. I know that as someone who is as comfortable in the kitchen as I am, and as someone who lives in Brooklyn – self-proclaimed home of the DIY food movement – should turn his nose up at using store-bought mixes, but these early projects are more about building confidence, practicing, and evaluating what is missing from my kitchen that will enable me to bake.

That said, I’m glad you’re reading this and are along with me on this journey. Please feel free to offer encouragement or suggestions in the comments of each post.

- Jon