If I thought I was mad at Kim for the hell she put me through making wonton wrappers, it was nothing compared to the deep desire I had to pull my hair out over baking chocolate cupcakes.
I began my yesterday afternoon in a great mood. Church was lovely, lunch was lovely, grocery shopping was lovely, and I hoped to have a cupcake in the midst of all this lovliness. I gathered up all my ingredients, pulled out the electric mixer, and began the baking process. Things began very smoothly. Even though I could never claim to be anything close to professional, baking is my thing. I've had the gist of it down by now since my mother stuck a spatula in my hand at the age of four. I think this love for baking stemmed more from my enjoyment of licking the beaters rather than the actual baking process, but that's beside the point. I know baking- and I know that the ratio of dry to wet ingredients is drastically off in Kim's recipe.
I had sifted the flour, cocoa powder, and other dry ingredients together. The almond milk had been set to curdle with the apple cider vinegar. I creamed the Earth Balance with the sugar. And then it all went horribly wrong. The dry ingredients were added along with the almond milk/apple cider vinegar mix and it rapidly became clear that there was not enough moisture to turn this into a batter. At first, I didn't panic. I still had 1/2 cup of orange juice to add with the hopes that it would cure my problem. Well, it didn't. I added more milk and it kind of improved things...ok, no it didn't. It just kept looking like a mess of stiff chocolate dough- not a smooth cake batter.
After some time of hoping an praying I could mix it out of disaster dough land and into happy cake batter land, I decided to just give it a go and throw the damn things in the over and see what would come out. What came out was just plain awful. The cupcakes looked so dry, which clearly makes sense since the dough (I never did get it into a batter) was so dry.
The cupcakes got set out on the counter to cool, I made myself a tempeh bacon BLT, and met up with my girlfriends to see Something Barrowed (which was adorable, by the way). I didn't try the cupcakes when I came home. I thought to myself that they couldn't be that bad. So, I whipped up the peanut butter frosting, which turned out splendidly. At least I managed to make something right. I frosted the cupcakes and took a bite.
YUCK.
The cupcakes were absolutely horrible. I honestly didn't know one could screw cupcakes up that badly. Lesson learned. I officially gave up for the night and got some shut eye. Upon waking up this morning, I sent a text to my friend who happens to be a baker (I slightly hate him for getting paid to do what I love most) and asked him if we could go over the recipe and figure out where I went wrong. I read the ingredients to him over the phone and asked him if it was at all weird for a cake batter recipe to have such a small amount of wet ingredients. He informed me that it was and we made plans to get together and figure this thing out.
This afternoon, I hauled the ingredients over to his apartment, slapped on an apron, and began showing him what I had done. He had the genius idea of putting a pan of water in the oven while it preheated so it would hold moisture. When we got to the "disaster zone" part of the recipe where we mixed the dry and wet ingredients into the Earth Balance and suger mixture, he instantly saw the very obvious problem that there was simple not enough wet ingredients to make a real batter. We added two more cups of almond milk and that seemed to do the trick. The dough turned into a beautiful cake batter and eventually into beautiful little cupcakes :)
We did decide that we could get away with reducing the additional almond milk by 1/4 cup and doubling the baking soda and powder, since the cupcakes didn't rise as much as they should have. So, when I get around to trying this I will let y'all know how it goes.
(Sorry, I didn't get a picture of them with the peanut butter frosting. Oops.)
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