Cupcake theory

[ChrisTaylor]

I want to be able to make birthday cakes for my students. Catering for different tastes and for primary school kids, I figure cupcakes are better than a full-sized sponge. I can make 2-3 batches for the class in different flavours. I don't need to bring a knife into the classroom and muck around cutting portions. I'm going to ask them what flavours they like in fruits/vegetables/etc and try and work from that. I mean, if I can get away with having more than bog standard chocolate cupcakes, that'd be cool. If a kid really likes, say, oranges, to make an orange cupcake would be cool. Or a beetroot cupcake. Or whatever.

I want to get some experimentation in to see what's possible with the cupcake format as I don't do a lot of baking. What's a good base recipe for cupcakes that I can, within obvious limitations (i.e. adding too many solid things like berries/chocolate chips, too much of a liquid ingredient, too much of some powdered ingredient like cocoa powder would impact in a negative way on the end result), modify? What's the best way of flavouring cakes--and I mean the sponge here, not the icing. Ideally I'd like to avoid the expense of speciality ingredients like freeze dried blueberry powder.

Edited December 1, 2010 by ChrisTaylor (log)

[tmriga]

My big concern here is whether any of your students have food allergies, and to what extent.

I used to work with a woman who was so allergic to eggs that she could not eat them as an ingredient in a food.

Other than that, pound cake takes to added ingredients well. It's not very sweet, and bakes up nicely as a cupcake, as long as your timing is right.

Theresa

[ChrisTaylor]

Yeah. I'll have a list of allergies. Schools here are generally nut-free zones, anyway. Especially in terms of stuff the school provides to kids. I'll dig around for some gluten-free and egg-free recipes for any kids with those issues.

[ChrisZ]

As Tmriga says, a basic pound cake recipe is fine- equal quantities by weight of butter, sugar, eggs & flour. A few months ago I googled through loads of cupcake recipes. They were all pound cakes. Some had a small amount of milk added, or perhaps orange juice, but in terms of proportions all the recipes I found were 1:1:1:1. You can easily add cocoa/chocolate, orange zest or even a gingerbread spice mix without catastrophe.