One Disaster After Another

You know how in the post about the Salted Caramel Squares I talked about how I'm not such a great baker? I wasn't being modest.

This past weekend I baked up some cupcakes to celebrate Blake and Britta's 5th Anniversary. Let me take a moment to quantify "some." Some = 6 dozen. It should have only been 3 dozen, but I screwed them up. Apparently two of my three cupcake/muffin pans bake this recipe a lot faster than the recipe indicates. Which left me with a first batch of 2 dozen inedibly burnt and 1 dozen perfect white cupcakes.

Left - burnt. Right - perfect.

The photo doesn't even really do these justice. The bottoms of the burnt cupcakes are actually black and carbon-y. The burnt cupcake wrapper and the burnt bottom of the cake are one black, flaky mess. Gross.
So I baked up a second batch of cupcakes. Even though I took them out a lot sooner, I still had a few unacceptably darkened bottoms, but in the end, there were enough cupcakes for the party.

Then it was time to move onto the frosting. I selected a vanilla buttercream because I wanted them to look wedding-y for this wedding-themed party. Somehow, the buttercream was another fail. I don't know how, but when it was done, it tasted like butter. Not like vanilla. I ended up dumping about a cup and a half of powdered sugar and at least 2 tablespoons of vanilla and Grand Marnier in an attempt to give the frosting a flavor other than butter. No dice. With no ingredients left to work with, I gave up and piped the cupcakes.

While I was piping frosting onto the cupcakes, I heard a crazy loud crash followed by a louder crash. Outside the window seen below, there was a huge accident in the intersection, and one car had hit the building diagonally across the street from mine after hitting the other car.

So I called 911. Amazingly, the driver whose car was stopped by a large apartment building was fine, despite having to be cut out of the car by the fire department. People, this is why you wear seatbelts. This is the fourth accident I have witnessed in this intersection in the past year. SFers, be warned.

Anyhow, this was the final result. Cake: 9/10, Frosting 3/10 (would be a 2 but the sprinkles were tasty).

Oh, and here's the recipe for the cupcakes. I always trust Martha Stewart recipes for baking - every recipe comes out perfect (pan issue not withstanding). I'm not posting the frosting recipe. Next time, I'll just use The Cake Bible, which is what I should have done in the first place.

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