Magnolia Bakery's Bobbie Lloyd tells you how to ruin a cupcake

No, it's not a how to, but more like a baking how not to over at the Food & Wine blog Mouthing Off. Here's one of the six ways Bobbie Lloyd, president of the famous Magnolia Bakery shares to ruin a cupcake:

2. Using warm butter. Cupcake recipes often call for room-temperature butter, but what is room temperature? “For all intents and purposes, it should be 70 degrees,” says Lloyd, “but most people's home kitchens are too warm.” This is a problem if you want to make cupcakes from scratch, since butter is the leavening in those recipes. “When the butter is warmer than it needs to be,” she says, “you can’t whip it into the ingredients long enough, meaning the end result doesn’t come out as it should.” Her quick tip: If you take butter straight out of the fridge, then put it in the microwave on defrost for 10 seconds, it should reach the correct texture.

Comments

Joyfull40 said…
Butter is the levening in scratch baking? Well, I'll be darned. I always thought butter, or shortening, or lard, or oil, was the fat in scratch baking. Amazing! After 50 plus yrs of using baking soda, baking powder, or whipped egg whites as levening in my scratch baking, I find I've been doing it wrong all along!