Butter Lane Wasn’t Lying About Their Name – My Cupcake Adventure
Dr. Awesome got me the best gift ever for my birthday: A new, Kitchen-Aid stand mixer! Eager to break it out, I enlisted the help of my trusty baking friend Lee (who was visiting us from Ohio). Actually, the idea came from a trip to Butter Lane earlier in the day. My friend Wes took a class there and let me borrow the recipes. This was the first time I made cupcakes and icing from scratch.
Creaming the butter and sugar together. The recipe makes 30 cupcakes. Now, I don’t know if all cupcake recipes are like this, but this particular one called for a bunch of butter and sugar. And by a bunch, I mean a whole hell of a lot.
I ran out to Sur La Table special to make these. It was a great investment. The cupcake pan has a coating on it, so when we made another batch and I ran out of papers, they popped out really easily. Win.
Lee is taking the cupcakes out of the pan.
My first-ever attempt at a double boiler to melt chocolate. And it worked! This was for the chocolate icing. I took it off the heat when it was getting too hot and put it back on when we were almost ready. No burning here!
Mixing in action!
The finished product. Dr. Awesome ate a bunch of these pre-frosting. The next batch we made are still sitting on my table, waiting for people to nom them.
Having always mixed things by hand, this made life a lot easier. Now that it’s strawberry season, I’m going to try my hand at making some strawberry cakes (this recipe looks so yummy and easy!) and pie crust (with lard from our Flying Pigs Farm CSA) filled with strawberries and rhubarb (from which I got an awesome recipe from my new pork CSA friend Josie!) She also gave me two jars of homemade Bacon Jam, which I know that Dr. Awesome is dying to get into.
Our veggie CSA from the Sixth Street CSA started out really well! We got two apples, garlic scapes, kale, lettuce, cilantro and radishes. Dr. Awesome and I are going to use some of our bounty tonight, along with a kielbasa from our pork CSA. Never had garlic scapes before, so that’ll be an interesting cooking experience!
Berkshire Blue Cheese news: My father is working on a smoked blue cheese which should be really interesting, plus we’re going to be making some dressing for sale this weekend! Exciting times in the “blue” world.
I YUM New York 
Your blog is so much fun to read…I love your enthusiasm for food and can practically taste the batter and the frosting and wish I could have eaten one or two or three! And how did I not know that your dad is working on a smoked blue cheese? Am I always the last to find out everything?!!!
Thanks so much, Ellen! 🙂 Well, I will save some blue cheese dressing for you 🙂 I’ll tell him he needs to start spreading the word about the smoked stuff. Hopefully it’ll come out good!