A Georgetown student in search of cupcakes has many pricey options. Georgetown Cupcake offers a cornucopia of cake and frosting choices, but at $2.75 each, satisfying a serious cupcake craving can get expensive. Unwilling to fork over that much dough for such a tiny treat, my editor and I decided to try to bake our own cupcakes in an attempt to give ourselves a cheaper alternative to the M Street establishment.
Since I generally prefer “improvisational cooking” to the real, recipe-based kind, I wasn’t confident in my ability to follow detailed instructions involving precise measurements. But even though my personal culinary explorations rarely result in actual edible food, I figured following the instructions on the Betty Crocker mix I picked up from Vital Vittles (no way was I going to trek to the Rosslyn Safeway just to pick up granulated sugar and shortening for real cupcakes) wouldn’t be past my narrow cooking ability.
We hit our first snag when the box called for the bottom of the pan to be slickened with some kind of oil. Without any Pam, we decided to melt some butter on the stove and pour it into the cupcake pan, leaving a few centimeters of sizzling liquid butter in each chamber. (My basic cooking philosophy: when in doubt, add more butter).
The real challenge proved to be mixing the Betty Crocker powder with the water, eggs, and butter like the back of the box demanded. Although the water, eggs, and powder quickly congealed into a disconcerting yellow ooze, the three sticks of butter remained totally solid and refused to blend into the mix. After a futile attempt at slicing the sticks into submission with the sharp end of a serving spoon, we decided that the best way to get the butter to liquefy would be to heat the whole mixing bowl on the stove so that the blocky sticks would melt.
Ultimately, that strategy proved only partly successful because the mix started to cook on the stovetop, but by that point we were frustrated with the entire cooking process and opted just to pour the chunky mélange into the cupcake pan, put it in the oven, and see what happened.
The cupcakes that emerged 15 minutes later were short, squat, and excruciatingly salty (probably because of all that extra butter). Frosted with a standard Pillsbury chocolate icing, they became fairly tolerable, though each bite contained an almost unbearable amount of butter.
Though the baking itself gave us more trouble than we had bargained for, the $13 we spent to make a dozen semi-edible pastries definitely beats shelling out $2.75 per mini cake at Georgetown Cupcake. That is, if you have more baking skills than we do.
