‘500 Cupcakes’ – review

I will aways choose quality over quantity and the recipe book ‘500 Cupcakes’ is a perfect example.  I would rather have 5 excellent cupcake recipes than 500 which are below par.  Most of the recipes are very variations of the same.  This would be acceptable if the recipes were great, but judging from the 2 which I have tried I would bake neither again.  I will not bother trying any more.  I have now googled a few recipes which look good and I will try.  All I need is 2 base recipes to work on and adapt, a chocolate and a vanilla, from there I can muck about a bit with adding stuff and doing different icings.  I am particularly keen to try out the strawberry and rose essences which I bought recently. 

The recipes which I tried were a raspberry one and the vanilla cupcakes.  I made the raspberry ones in January with my daughter, I can’t remember what we didn’t like about them but they were generally a flop and a waste of good raspberries picked from the garden.  This week I made the vanilla cupcakes, I didn’t like the ‘raising agent’ aftertaste in my mouth, self-raising flour and baking powder are probably unnecessary.  I wasn’t mad about the texture and they collapsed in the middle.  The raising agent overkill possibly caused them to rise too fast and then sink, I concede that although I followed the recipe to the letter possibly the fault lay with my oven although it bakes everything else beautifully.  When looking up what causes cupcakes to collapse I read that it can be caused by too much batter in the muffin tin, I made 18 as instructed but 20 may have meant a bit less batter in each.  I don’t know and I’m not going to bother with the recipe again to try fix it. 

I did find the many variations interesting and would like to try some of the ideas, but with a different basic recipe.  If I find what I consider the perfect vanilla or chocolate cupcake recipe I will update this post with a link.