A Tasty Sidebar

This isn’t my typical post about diet, exercise, inspiration or life. Unless you consider that I purposefully make these with regular wheat flour because my family can eat gluten – it’s just me who can’t. I create my own roadblock to devouring these!

The plan for these started last night when Allison said she wanted to make cupcakes today. She wanted vanilla cupcakes. What? Who doesn’t want chocolate cupcakes given the opportunity? Allison. I didn’t have a white cake mix. I didn’t have frosting. I didn’t have powdered sugar for homemade frosting. My plan had been to stay home this week-end – at least Friday and Saturday – get some stuff done, decompress. Besides, I’m attempting to be more frugal and what are the chances that I would go to the store and pick up just what I needed for these cupcakes?

After she was in bed, I searched online for a vanilla cake recipe and found one that’s as easy as any cake mix – but tastes better, I’m told. A good dense cake – not airy and plain. And for frosting without powdered sugar in it. This is where you can find them:

Simple White Cake

No-cook Icing

This is what Allison wrote in the notebook she calls her “blog:”

            Today me and Mom will bake homemade cupcakes. Have you

done this before? Well, you need a fantastic mother who is great

at cooking to help you. To get started, ask your Mom or Dad to

help with the recipe. Wait for them to get the ingredients. They will

taste good when you’re all done.

These recipes are both wonderful. I didn’t want the frosting to just taste like sugar. So, I boiled one cup of water with a handful of dried berries. I always have them in the house to eat with my oatmeal. I strained it when I was done and just used the half cup of that water rather than the plain water the recipe calls for. I did take a taste of that and it was very flavorful.

The one thing about the frosting is it mentions in the directions to use a stand mixer. This is a great idea unless you possess super-herculean upper-body strength, which I clearly do not. The hand mixer was already dirty from mixing the cake – how long could it take for soft peaks to form anyway? Uh…30 minutes! I was singing Devo's "Whip it" in my head because I'm adept at  entertaining myself in any given situation. Put this in a stand mixer and go about your day – do a load of laundry, read a book, talk amongst yourselves…then come back to it.

I love the picture of this cake on the website above. There are really so many things you could do with this frosting – adding actual fruit you’ve put through the food processor or chocolate if you want me to run right on over. It’s very pretty. I quit mixing a bit before the soft peaks formed, but it worked out perfectly because our frosting looks kind of like the snow on the rooftops right now.