My Belief System

I believe in true love. I believe that the outside of a horse is good for the inside of a man. And I believe that ice cream can make just about any thing or situation better.

I do not believe in boxed cake mixes. At all. Not brownie or cookie mixes either, but mostly cake. And making cake from scratch can be intimidating the first time, but the end result is worth it, not to mention your friends will think you are a genius. And, you'll be able to pronounce all the ingredients in your cake. Can't say that with boxed mixes, can ya?

With pictures, making a batch of cake batter took me about 20 minutes. So strap on your aprons, folks! Let's break it down!!

First, you need an excuse. Like... "I want cake!" or, in my case, this adorable baby was celebrating her first birthday. And seeing as she's pretty much awesome, I couldn't turn her down.

And her daddy there is an executive chef at a fancy restuarant, so I had to show off my mad skilz!

Next you need a recipe. My standby is the 1-2-3-4 Yellow Cake in "The Joy of Cooking" (a note... the recipes in TJC are laid out in a sort of odd way... read the whole recipe through very carefully... twice).

"The Hardware" as Alton Brown calls it...

Liquid measure, mixing bowl (for the dry ingredients), two bowls for the batter (one for the base, one for whipping egg whites), a rubber spatula, dry measure cups and measuring spoons. And whatever baking vessle you desire. I had a muffin tin.

Then you have the players themselves... butter, sugar, eggs, cake flour, milk, vanilla, baking powder and cream of tartar. Have everything at room temp. This helps everyone get to be really good friends!

I personally like to beat the room temperature butter all by itself to get it going...

Then I add the sugar and cream for a good three minutes. It should be noticably fluffier when you're ready to proceed... b/c the sugar has punched holes in the fat (butter) which means theres a lot of air now incorporated in there.

Add your egg YOLKS one at a time, and beat after each addition....

Then add your sifted or whisked flour & baking powder (which you combined in that mxing bowl)...

and alternate that with your milk and vanilla.

Scrape everything down, and give it another good mix. Just a few seconds is fine. If you beat too much once the flour is added, you risk a tough cake.

So now you're half way there! You've got the cake batter base! Hurray!

Time to move on over to that other bowl and whip the egg WHITES!

I beat mine a tad to get them frothy, then add the cream of tartar. Then once the whites are starting to get some air into them and are opaque, I crank the mixer on high and slowly stream in the sugar. There is no picture of that step... it was hard to capture what with only two hands and all...

But please note that TJC asks for stiff but not dry peaks....

Like these. Glossy and lovely!

I realized too late I did not add the pictures of folding those lovely glossy egg whites into the batter base.... but you really can't screw it up. Dump about a third of the whites into the base, and mix gently. No fancy schmancy folding. Just be gentle. Then lather, rinse and repeat until you've got everything encorporated.

TA DA!!!!!! Cake batter from scratch!

Then get the cutest cupcake liners you can find (!!)

And line your tins... and fill! I used approximately 1/4 cup of batter for each cupcake, though I probably could have used a little more. Using that measurement this recipe made exactly two and a half dozen cupcakes (baked in several batches since, remarkably, I only have one tin).

Bake until golden brown and delisious! (18 minutes-ish)

And when they're cool enough to frost, slather on the good stuff! I made strawberry buttercream (yes, from scratch) and piped it on fancy-schmancy. Remember: I was trying to impress my brother-in-law the chef.

He was pretty impressed.

p.s. every single picture in this post was taken with my new HTC Evo phone, in my kitchen with its two windows. Not a pixle was retouched by photo-editing software. This cell phone is the bomb. Amen.