As I am sure you will soon find, most of my attempts from Pinterest are food related, though not all. For a long time I was on this big cupcake kick. Not neceessarily buying or eating them, just pinning a ton of recipes for them. Maybe I was thinking about one day making these gourmet treats for bake sales or class birthday parties when I become a mom but realistically, I was probably sitting at work, starving and bored, and cupcakes kept jumping out at me from Pinterest. So... one night I decided to finally try one of these bad boys out. I chose the Vanilla Almond Cupcakes because for some reason I was also on an almond kick, even though I hate almonds.
I hope to have more "in progress" pictures for later posts but since I made these last February, I only took an after picture. The recipe called for several ingredients more than my usual cake from a box creations so this required a trip to the grocery store. Despite my best efforts at combing the baking aisle for twenty minutes, I could not locate almond meal. I finally decided I would just buy a package of slided almonds and grind them up in the food processor. Later upon checking the internet, I found this is exactly what you are supposed to do to get almond meal, so go me! The recipe also required a vanilla bean and those little babies are expensive. Fortunately for me, my Mom had given me a jar with a few of them so I had those on hand and didn't have to shell out $20 to make 12 cupcakes.
So, after mixing up the batter and sampling it, I wasn't super jazzed yet. I'm a huge believer in delicious batter. The better the batter, the better the baked product. Just look at chocolate chip cookies, brownies, and box cakes... mmmm. Frankly, I would generally rather just eat the batter for most things but then you get people shouting at you about salmonella... Funny story, I've eaten what must equate to a hundred raw eggs over the years with my consumption of cookie dough and batters and I have never once gotten salmonella. My husband who has eaten exactly 0 raw eggs... got salmonella from tomatoes (we think). Of course, now I'm probably tempting things by gloating. Also, I do imagine that when I have kids I'll be worried about them eating this stuff and getting sick but for now, I choose to indulge.
Okay, so back to the baking. I baked the cupcakes and they smelled really good in the oven, so much so that even my non-dessert eating husband took an interest. On to the icing. As a disclaimer, I previously tried making another icing with blackberries and it was the grossest thing I have ever seen or tasted. Picture separated butter bits in a super sweet tasting jam. I was of course skeptical about this blackberry icing for fear it would end up the same way. I followed the directions to a T and found myself with a substance similar to the nastiness I had created before but I decided to press on and give it longer to mix together. This proved to be the magic cure... separated butter bits in sweet jam turned in to smooth, tasty buttercream icing. I had hoped it would taste a little more like blackberries and less like powdered sugar, perhaps dreaming of the pure taste of blackberries in a creamy form but I guess that's not really how buttercream works.
So, I let my cupckaes cool, piped on the icing and decided to jazz them up with a fresh blackberry on top because I didn't have any pretty litle marzipan flowers like in the picture. Once done, my husband and I indulged. He really liked them but I'm thinking that's mostly because of the almond. He loves nuts and isn't a huge fan of sweets. I feel pretty graitified when he likes a dessert I make. I found the cupcakes to be super moist and it wasn't your standard cupcake experience so overall, a success I think. I took the rest into work and people didn't say much about them, they seemed to prefer the standard vanilla and chocolate ones I also made that day... oh well.
Made It Rating: 8/10
Hopefully I'll get to continue to sample the delicious attempts :)
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