Baking: Maple Bacon Cupcakes

Baking?! Yes.. I finally baked dessert. Cupcakes to be exact. This is the third time in my life that I've made them. The first two times were out of a Disney cook book when my sister and I were little kids. Based on that experience and the simplicity of that recipe, I wondered.. how hard could it be to make maple bacon cupcakes? I found this recipe through tastespotting thought it was an interesting mix of savory and sweet. Link: http://lifewithcake.com/2009/05/french-toast-and-bacon-cupcakes/

I studied the recipe briefly but forgot to print out the recipe before I went to the store. When I got home with my groceries, I checked the recipe and found I was missing heavy cream and maple extract. Poop. Two trips to the grocery store later, I was all set.

I started out by making the batter and that's where I messed up. I accidentally added the maple instead of the vanilla extract. *sigh* Oh well. After making the batter, I needed to whip the egg whites. However, when I separated the egg yolks, I discarded the egg whites into the sink. Dammit! Luckily I still had three more eggs to work with. I whipped the whites until they were stiff and folded them into the batter. After distributing the fluffy batter into their cupcake holders, I baked them at 375 degrees for 25 minutes since my oven runs a little hot.

While the cupcakes were baking away, I made the frosting by combining powdered sugar & butter. When the mixture was well combined and kinda fluffy, I added the heavy cream and vanilla extract since I didn't want to duplicate the maple flavor in the frosting. When the frosting was done, I put it in the fridge to cool. The recipe said the frosting would keep in the fridge for 3 days.

When the cupcakes were done, I put them onto a plate to cool overnight. I was pooped. This whole process took me about 2.5 hours.

This morning, I baked the bacon and checked on the frosting. What the hell?? The frosting had hardened and was completely unuseable. I should've figured that butter hardens back up once you put it in the fridge. I didn't feel like waiting for it to soften up again so I made a complete new batch. I used a ziplock bag with one of the corners cut off as a piping bag but the first few looked like white poop on a cupcake. Only ONE cupcake looked decent enough to give to Justyn. I topped it with a piece of bacon and lit the candle. He said it was really good but way too much frosting. I agree. The frosting would even be too much for a sugar fiend. He scraped off most of it and after that it tasted pretty good.

After a lot of lessons learned... here's how it turned out.

The rejects