Bubby’s Leaf Cupcakes

Bubby gets intense about trees. I noticed this last time I was in Mount Shasta visiting Sophia and her ilk. On our daily excursions to the lake, I’d sit next to Bubby in the backseat of Sophia and Jeff’s not-insanely-sized SUV and watch Bubby’s wide, blue eyes move with quick, focused precision from tree to tree outside the window. He would do this for random moments throughout the car ride, when he wasn’t giving his attention to his toy cars or soliciting Sophia to talk for his Mickey Mouse toy. During those tree-centric moments, Bubby would look serious and say nothing.

One afternoon, during the ride back down from the lake, Bubby started saying, “Leaf… cupcake…” The latter because Bubby’s into cupcakes (that wise young man knows what’s important in the world). The former perhaps birthed from the moments of stern solemnity in which he took in the sight of the forest. Whatever the concept was in his two-year-old mind that inspired the joint leaf-and-cupcake preoccupation, it remained for the duration of the car ride: “Leaf cupcake… leaf cupcake…”

It was less of a demand and more of a thoughtful rumination, I think, but nevertheless it’s why Bubby was promised cupcakes. Of course, when we got back to the house, it turned out “leaf cupcake” had more to do with the Play Doh cupcakes that Bubby had made a day or two before… but Sophia and I made him cupcakes anyway.

Play Doh molded into abstract blobs?
Hell no. These are cupcakes. Indisputably so.

Sophia suggested the Nigella Lawson recipe for yellow cupcakes with royal icing, which Sophia had used for her wedding cake years ago. Jeff pitched in a request to incorporate lemon into the cake, e.g. by means of injection and preferably in the form of lemon curd. We discovered that injecting wouldn’t be possible: this was Mount Shasta, the tiny town with a startling crystal-shop-to-everything-else-ratio (exact ratio: a BUH-JILLION:not many). You can find any gemstone you could possibly need to open your chakras and/or improve your communication with angels, but there’s nothing to be had when it comes to things like socks and a-fore-referred-to injector mabobs.

As far as we know, in a world-ending scenario, it may pan out to be practical to have a surplus of chakra-opening crystals around (…and weapons. An armory’s right there). Even though we were injector-less, our situation was not the end of the world, both in the literal sense and in the cupcake sense. After the cupcakes were out of the oven and sufficiently cooled, Sophia and I ended up digging holes in each with a spoon and applying generous dabs of lemon curd before replacing the dug-out cake debris. (Which ended up being effectively tasty, IMO. Well-matched components indeed.)

Mind you, when I say “Sophia and I ended up digging holes”, I really mean that Sophia dug holes while I took on and quickly gave up on the icing. Royal icing is basically like a meringue, which, judging from previous baked Alaska flops, I’m just a fucking genius with. Unlike a meringue, royal icing doesn’t get baked at all. But like a meringue, when making royal icing, protein is the enemy. Even the slightest bit of yolk will sully the whole batch, invalidating its ability to rise, and ruining Christmas.

Of course, the second egg I cracked open was the one where the yolk slipped right out and landed exactly where I DID NOT want it to be. I dealt with this by making noise about how Sophia, it’s haaaarrrrrrddd…

To which Sophia gently asked how I was going to become an expert if I didn’t try. I do want to be the girl with the most cake, don’t I?

To which I responded with more noise, and as soon as the last cupcake was curded, Sophia appeased me. One two-year-old is enough without a twenty-six-year-old’s vocabulary rapidly regressing into only words that can easily be drawn out in an inconsolable whine. This wasn’t an observation of Sophia’s, as far as I know. I later recognized it as the stratagem of my inner league of meringue-phobes.

Sophia finished the icing and deftly spread it onto the cupcakes. The icing was pretty: stunningly white and smooth when first applied.

It does look like something at a wedding.

Two cupcakes were set aside for Bubby during the curding and we drew big, green leaves on them so that we could tell them apart from the rest (we didn’t think he’d like the lemony ones). I hadn’t really thought beyond the leaves, which gave more reasons to be glad Sophia was there. She tried her hand at piping tiny rosettes on the cupcake tops. I totally wouldn’t have thought of that. Our finished product looked so pretty!

After a while, royal icing cools and hardens a little on the top, which is pretty neat.

See the cracks?

I feel compelled to announce that if you are considering executing this recipe, please know that the icing will knock you on your ass with how sweet it is. I thought I’d be acclimated to the sugariest of climates by now what with my frequent, manic fits of cupcake production, but that royal icing wiped me out, man. Like bruising your tailbone at roller derby practice, only without the pain.

Also, rewinding a little, Sophia remembers the cake at her wedding being less “fall-apart-y” than our leaf cupcakes. The Nigella Lawson recipe calls for a food processor for most of the batter-mixing. The metal-blade attachment of Sophia’s Cuisinart was M.I.A. and we settled on a plastic attachment with shorter blades that’s usually used for bread dough. If you find yourself in an eerily similar situation, I’d recommend skipping the Cuisinart and mixing the ingredients with a bowl and a spoon. The mixing will be more effective that way and the consistency of the cupcakes will ultimately be more stable and less crumbly.

Overall, the cupcakes were a success. Not just because they were so pretty, but because Bubby seemed to enjoy his.

(btw, Sophia has a recipe blog)

When’s the last time you baked something for a toddler?
Do you have any inner meringue-phobes? What about salmonella fears?
If there was a cupcake apocalypse, would gemstones help?