Cupcake Camp is coming to Adelaide on Sunday 22 November.  This means it’s time for me to start practising baking (and decorating) cupcakes.  What a trial!

Since I like messing around with recipes, I dug out my 1920s Handbook for Bakers by Albert F Gerhard.  All the recipes are given in commercial quantities, in imperial, using 1920s American ingredients … so there’s quite a lot of work that needs to be done before hitting the kitchen.  I decided to start with the first cup cake recipe and scale down from 12 dozen to just … one.

The result was a cupcake recipe that made good cupcakes with a fine, moist crumb.  That said – there’s nothing outrageous about the recipe!

Preheat the oven to 180C (160C fan).

Cream 100g of caster sugar with 75g of unsalted butter.  Add 2 eggs and combine well before adding 175g of self raising flour.  Flavour with 1 tsp of vanilla essence and finish by adding 1 tsp of baking powder dissolved in 1/2 cup of milk.

When everything is well combined, spoon the mixture into cupcake cases and bake … until done.  I had a massive fail with the oven so I can’t actually tell you how long the baking took!  The recipe suggests you’ll need to bake for about 10 minutes – but after 10 minutes the cakes weren’t cooked.  The oven then turned itself off.  About 10 minutes later, perplexed by the cakes still not being cooked, I realised this and turned the oven back on.

So … if you don’t know how to operate your oven, baking will take about half an hour.  Still, it gave me plenty of time to do the dishes!

Once cool, I iced the cakes with a simple chocolate icing and finished with chocolate sprinkles.

And there are now none left!