Recipe Source: King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking. The Countryman Press, Woodstock, 2006 pp. 368 - 9.
Fearless Baby had a birthday recently. This is a big deal. She turned two. This technically means that she is no longer a baby and I should be calling her Fearless Toddler. It's strange, though. When I close my eyes I see her as she is now, long hair and distinct features and a human walk and human gestures. When I look directly at her though she looks no different to me than she did when they first brought her to me in my hospital room. Maybe this is normal and hormonal, something that happens to your neurochemistry once your body realizes that it is no longer pregnant. Maybe my eyes need to be checked. I don't know.
Anyway, this is not a Mommy blog, this is a food blog. Birthdays mean food. I tried not to do too much for this party, because I was already stretched to the fraying point before the party and at the end of the day it's not about the food it's about the toddler. Still some things are expected. Food is expected; I served a sandwich board with homemade bread, some basic hors d'oeuvres, chips, popcorn. And cake is expected. Fearless Baby is two. She is not the neatest of eaters on the best of days. Furthermore, she is a very mobile eater. She wanders through the house gnawing her way through house and home. (Before you criticize our parenting and say, "Well you need to strap her down and force her to sit still when she eats," this has been tried without success. I will spare you the details but suffice it to say that the dog gained about a pound and we continue to pick peas out of the moulding.) I decided that while I would infinitely prefer a chocolate cake, the guests would prefer not to have chocolate ground into their clothes. Furthermore, chocolate is bad for dogs, so I left it out. I made a few small changes to the recipe. I made this a 100% whole wheat cake instead of mixing white and whole-wheat flour as called for in the original. Everyone on our guest list is concerned for various reasons about health and sweets and I have really come to prefer whole-wheat products to white flour. This necessitated adding more liquid in the form of yogurt. Turning the cake into cupcakes was another alteration, although not exactly rocket science. I frosted the cake with stabilized whipped cream, which is nothing more exciting than whipped cream with gelatin.
So there are two things to note about the results. Flavor-wise I was very happy with them. Structure-wise I was also very happy with them. The color was less enthralling. Originally I had intended to have a koala-themed party in honor of Fearless Baby's best friend in the whole wide world, Little Bear. Unfortunately the party store had absolutely no koala bear things at all. It became a Hello Kitty party very quickly, and I bought the official Hello Kitty food colorings. When I was adding the official Hello Kitty Food Coloring to the stabilized whipped cream I sneezed. This resulted in a whole lot more food coloring being added to the cream than intended. I guess the color is okay. I mean, I always kind of wanted hair that color. The problem is that it stains, oh yes it does, which made avoiding chocolate kind of moot. We have not yet received any dry cleaning bills.
The other item of note regarding this event is attendance. So far Boston has received precisely one "storm" and it hit on the day of the party. It's not so much the storm that kept people home, though. It's the idiots. Honestly. People around here were for the most part born and raised in the same town where they currently reside. It snows every year and has snowed every year since they were born. Somehow, though, the snow makes people drive like flaming, flying morons. While my perfectly sensible friends were more than capable of driving themselves in the snow they feared the morons on the road and stayed home. Those who did show up proved the absentees right: there were spinouts all over the place (for the record, all-wheel drive does NOT mean impervious to snow and ice!) and at least one snowplow driving the wrong way on the high way. At 50 miles per hour. To make matters worse, about half my guest list attended a major science-fiction convention here in Boston the week before the party. The main feature of said convention appears to have been an outbreak of norovirus, which then made the rounds of my friends and resulted in several very sensible cancellations. So I had more food than it turns out I needed, but under the circumstances that's okay.
Fearless Baby's Birthday Cupcakes (makes 36; approx. $0.66/serving)
15 1/4 ounces whole wheat pastry flour
8 1/2 ounces whole wheat all-purpose flour
3 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
4 sticks butter
21 ounces raw sugar
2 teaspoons salt
8 eggs
2 tablespoons vanilla extract
20 ounces low-fat Greek yogurt
Stabilized whipped cream
Equipment:
- Cupcake tins
- Cupcake liners
- Cooking spray
- Stand mixer with paddle attachment
- Disher
- Bowl
- Pastry bag with wide star tip
- Preheat oven to 350°.
- Line the cupcake tins with the cupcake liners. Spray the liners with cooking spray.
- Combine the flours, baking powder, and baking soda in the bowl. Set aside.
- Combine the butter, sugar and salt in the stand mixer. Cream until light and fluffy.
- Add the eggs one at a time. Scrape the bottoms and sides of the bowl frequently, after each addition is a good start.
- Add 1/3 of the flour mixture. Beat well. Scrape.
- Add 1/2 of the yogurt and 1/2 of the vanilla. Mix well. Scrape.
- Repeat 6 and 7 in order until the ingredients are all mixed together.
- Use the disher to portion out the cupcake batter between the tins.
- Bake 22 - 24 minutes or until a tester inserted into a cupcake comes out clean.
- Cool completely before frosting.
- Load your frosting into the pastry bag with the wide star tip.
- Pipe the frosting onto the cupcakes. I decorated with an additional Hello Kitty decoration. You can leave it out.
- Serve.
