Replenishing our cupcake stash

Yellow Cream Cake
The Recipes of Madison County Copyright 1995

½ cup butter
1 ½ cups sugar
4 egg yolks
2 ¾ cups all-purpose flour
2 ½ teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
1 ¼ cups milk
2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Beat butter at medium speed of electric mixer until creamy; gradually add sugar, beating well. Add egg yolks, one at a time, beating after each addition.

Combine flour, baking powder and salt; add to butter mixture alternately with milk, beginning and ending with the flour mixture. Mix at low speed for at least one minute after each addition until blended. Stir in vanilla. Pour batter into 2 greased and floured 9-inch round cakepans.

Bake at 350 degrees for 25 to 30 minutes or until a wooden pick inserted in the center comes out clean. Cool in pans on wire racks 10 minutes; remove from pans, and let cool completely on wire racks.
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I had to restock my son's freezer stash of cupcakes. Due to his peanut allergy I need to be able to come up with a cupcake for him on short notice. I've found the easiest thing is to keep on hand plain frozen cupcakes and that decorator frosting that comes in a pressurized can with assorted decorating tips. I can't stand the stuff but he likes it. It's a tough assignment because I don't want to outshine the birthday cupcakes yet I don't want my son to feel left out. He doesn't seem to have a problem with it, mainly because I always put a few bits of candy on top (Sixlets on this one.)

Since the cupcake requests aren't all that frequent, I only made a half batch of this recipe and it worked out nicely. I got twelve cupcakes out of half the recipe. I was pleased with the results. These weren't as light and fluffy as the Almost Cake Mix Vanilla Cupcakes, but they were buttery and moist and overall a pretty good version of a yellow cupcake. They domed really nicely - not too flat, not too high.

The key is not to overbake cupcakes. You really have to stay on top of them or any recipe will be ruined if they stay in too long. Since I had no baking time for these since the recipe was for a layer cake, I had to be alert. They baked between 15 and 20 minutes I think.

My son used to pretty much only eat what was on top of any cupcake I made him (sometimes just the candy) but he's been eating the entire cupcakes lately. I was still surprised when he ate one of these cupcakes without anything on top whatsoever. They really didn't need anything. They were like a sweet muffin.

I've had this cookbook for quite some time and this was always one of the recipes I wanted to try. Unfortunately I didn't get to make it as a layer cake with the buttercream recipe in the book that I thought would probably be good too - a basic butter and confectioner's sugar with a half of a container of thawed Cool Whip added. I still want to try that someday. The recipes in this book don't rely on convenience foods so that Cool Whip must add something to that frosting. I will satisfy my curiosity someday but not today.

Question of the Day: Did you have birthday treats in school (for anyone) when you were a kid? We only had 'treats' when we had a party - Valentine's Day, Halloween and maybe Christmas. We would have a cupcake and an orange drink from the school cafeteria on those occasions. (I do remember a teacher making us brownies once for one of these holiday parties.) The rest of the year we only ate in school at lunchtime.