Cupcakes for Cupcake Camp

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!

Vanilla Cupcakes with Chocolate Icing

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

And there are now none left!

One thought on “Cupcakes for Cupcake Camp

  1. Dear AZP74, I read your baking experience with great interest, because my grandfather was Albert F. Gerhard, author of your Handbook for Bakers. Glad that you enjoyed his cupcakes; I did too!

    FYI – after a great career as an industrial baker and professor at Dunwoody Institute for ten years, he “retired” into ownership and operation of the small village bakery in Kaukauna Wisconsin, where not only did he product a variety of goods for local consumption, but also manufactured a very popular seasonal product for Chirstmas, the so called Honey House, made primarily with tradtional German gingerbread, complete with little figurines of Hansel and Gretel.

    He passed away in the early 1970’s, but his bakery and creation lives on with the next owner – http://www.hilltopbakers.com

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