Pride Cupcakes

Hey! Guess what’s going down tomorrow morning in San Francisco!?

Guess who’s NOT going to be there!?

My reasons for not going to the Gay Pride Parade:

1. It conflicts with my biweekly date to get bruised up at a roller rink.
2. The Clerk and I went when we were 19 and the consensus between us was, “Meh.”  So even if there was no derby practice, I’d just as soon stay home and re-read Valencia.

Therefore, to make up for lack of interest and attendance, I decided to try my hand at conjuring these FANTABULOUS rainbow cupcakes!

OM[gosh], this really happened!!!

I’m not gonna lie to you: these cupcakes made me nervous for several reasons. First of all: cake mix. The recipe prescribed cake mix and complying with this meant being all secretive because my family frowns on pre-packaged cake ingredients that come from a box. I’m in no way ready to come out of the Cake Mix Closet. Not to them anyway. Second of all: applesauce. I mean, really. I even emailed Sophia and was like, should I be concerned when a cupcake recipe calls for applesauce? Thirdly: when the recipe calls for instant pudding mix, it neglects the courtesy of specifying what size box. I was acutely aware of this while I was standing in front of a comprehensive display of EVERY POSSIBLE PUDDING MIX EVER at my local über Safeway.

Despite all this, as if with a bottle opener, I opened my mind and gave this sucka a try.

To get the rainbow effect, you alternate filling up the little muffin cups with each color of batter. It’s a bit of a Spatial Intelligence Guessing Game trying to get the proportions right, but it’s not perilously difficult, and the cupcakes will still end up tasting good even if you fail miserably.

In the process of layering.

The baking time ended up being longer than the original recipe said it’d be. At first I thought this was a result of my usual haramtia of putting too much batter in each wrapper, but I did come up with the same yield as the original recipe, so maybe it was a matter of uneven division of the batter?

You cannot look me in the eye and tell me this is a signifier of good baking practices.
Or maybe you can. I dunno, there's a reason why I have a propensity to get all lost in the supermarket
and have crises about pudding mix. #insecurebaker

In the original recipe, the frosting was all rainbowy and swirly, which looked great, but while I was reading the directions, I was like, “You lost me at ‘pastry bag.’”

I would advise against making the frosting at, like, four in the afternoon, putting it in the refrigerator, and taking it out at midnight to apply to the cupcakes. Unless you want to wait for-fucking-ever for it to defrost to a malleable, let alone spreadable consistency – in which case, please do. Please do stick your knife in the solid block of sugar-butter mass like an imperialist mutha sticking their flag in the ground.

I claim this frosting in the name of England.

Also, if, like me, you’re going to approach decorating from a standpoint of hella-sprinkles-per-cupcake: just one container of sprinkles isn’t going to do it. Word to the wise.

Like I said before, I had some initial qualms about the ingredient lineup, but the cupcakes were ultimately delicious. Having the vanilla flavor in the cake represented by pudding mix instead of extract definitely did not end poorly at all. The texture was nice. Not too moist. Not too dry.

Sure, they look ordinary before you discover they’re full of AWESOME.

And they looked bad ass, for what that’s worth! I took so many pictures! So pretty!

That yellow one after it came out of the oven - that’s my favorite.

But even though the yellow’s my favorite,
there aren’t many that I wouldn’t put on an xmas card, ya know?

How are you with pastry bags?
(If you’re in the Bay Area) are you going to Pride this year?