The Essential Baker on cupcakes

Carole Bloom's white chocolate cupcake with white chocolate frosting - get the recipe here



Carole Bloom, author of The Essential Baker, details why cupcakes are so wonderful and what you can do with them:

Decorating cupcakes is a lot of fun. Here’s where you want to pull out your pastry bag and tips and be creative. I like to use a large star tube to create a striking swirl design on top of cupcakes. Varying design patterns, sprinkling cocoa powder or confectioners’ sugar on top, or accenting them with a sliver of candied fruit or chopped nuts are all good ideas to give pizzazz to your cupcakes. It’s also great to use decorative candles on cupcakes to create a theme, like spelling out “Happy Birthday.”

I like to serve cupcakes with a scoop of ice cream or sorbet or “floated” in a raspberry or caramel sauce.

All this flexibility, plus the fact that everyone can have his own individual cake, has brought the cupcake back into the limelight. And those on “portion control” diets can appreciate the size of cupcakes; they’re usually smaller than that big slice out of a normal cake, especially if you make them in mini-cupcake pans.