cupcakes

For a couple weeks now, I have been thinking about cookies, specifically pistachio apricot oatmeal cookies. As is the case when I have a slow-burning obsession with a recipe, I quietly amass the ingredients over several weeks, and think about it in quiet moments and moments of stress. A couple of days ago, I finally had all the ingredients and I set out the butter to soften, but by the time it was room temperature, I began to think that cookies were too hard. Cookies can be crispy and crunchy and chewy, but they're generally not squishy and spongy and soft. Cookies are too unyielding, not friendly enough. Enter my obsession with cupcakes. I guess as I approach finals weeks, I need friendly, comforting desserts.

I'm a little ambivalent about the recipe I used. The cupcakes didn't rise that much, so the tops didn't have that appealing dome shape and, after all that philosophizing about soft desserts, I think maybe the cake has too fine of a crumb. Is that possible? It also seems a little eggy and that flavor overwhelms the vanilla. For frosting, I used a chocolate buttercream recipe and used 2 tablespoons of rose water instead of the chocolate. I was a little scared making the recipe because last night I got a frantic phone call from a friend who was trying to make some sort of cake frosting, so I referred her to the buttercream recipe. About an hour later, I got a follow-up call from her saying that,while making the recipe, her electric mixer had given up and decided to light itself on fire. Fortunately, my mixer held onto the will to live.

The heap of buttercream managed to mask some of the eggy flavor of the cupcake. Now to keep myself from eating them all in a fit of insanity...



[I guess the cupcake obsession was lingering in a less specific way than the cookie obsession... I saw Not Martha's cupcake tower and it has been lurking in my subconscious.]