The Iva Gabor/Green Acres approach to cupcakes
We decided to have one last try by wacking it all in a bowl, mixing it up and throwing it in the oven. How did that work for us? Fantastic!
What we changed
We used a different brand of cake flour which looked a lot lumpier in the box. When we measured it out @ 2 1/3 cups lo and behold it weighed so close to 10.5 oz we just topped it up a little. So now our sugar and flour would weigh the same.
We changed the red food coloring. We used Red Liquid Candy Color from BarryFarm.com. While the McCormick Red Food colouring is very runny, this stuff is thick and oily. In fact it was hard to wash off the spoon! But it made a great red color. Way better than McCormick and so this is a keeper.
What we did
We mixed the dry ingredients in a bowl with a whisk to spread out the cocoa powder better and then sifted it just liek before.
We mixed all the wet ingredients together as before.
So this just left the butter and eggs unmixed.
“One Bowl” says add the butter to the dry and a little bit of liquid and mix in it. So we put in the butter in about 6 pieces and added a little liquid. We tried that using the electric beater but the butter started to cling to the beater so that clearly was not going to work. So we went back the old fashioned method of using hands. Using a pastry method approach, we rubbed the butter into the flour mix and then we just threw in the liquid and eggs and mixed it up.
It looked runny and lumpy and not unreminisent of a cake mix.
And it tasted awful!
We’d left the sugar sitting on the kitchen counter. Major mistake but easy to understand since in the “creaming” method sugar is not classifed as a dry ingredient.
So back to hand methods to stir in the missing 1.5 cups of sugar and try and get out some of the lumps with a spoon.
End results? Still runny. Less lumpy. Tastes like cake batter.
What we found
This time we made:
- 12 @ 1.5 oz using IKEA cups cooked for 17 minutes
- 12 @ 1.2 oz using metal foil paper lined cups cooked for 16 minutes
- 11 @ 0.5 oz using paper cups cooked for 10 minutes.
They turned out great. They looked great in their cups.
They were light and fluffy. The red color was glorious.
They tasted just right. And while we could see a few lumps on the top, what is frosting for?
Conclusion
By coating the flour with butter before adding liquids, we reduced the amount of gluten formed and hence created a softer more “velvety” cake.
While using this method is supposed to create a cake of less volume but we did not see that happen. Maybe if we had made a large cake this might have been noticable but for our cupcakes they rose just as much and filled their cups the same as before.
All up this is a good way to make a butter cake that is supposed to be “velvet”.
Caleigh