icing fiascos & double maple cupcakes

When I heard about the Cupcakes for Charity event that SM4SC (Social Media for Social Change) was putting on to benefit the American Cancer Society, I was instantly excited about the idea. Cupcakes, a great cause, and a lot of new faces, all on one night under one roof. How can you beat that? I thought it was a perfect chance though to try out a new cupcake recipe and put those fun Halloween cupcake decorations I bought at Target to use.

Cupcakes going in...

As I’ve noted before, one of my all-time favorite flavors is maple. I’ve never seen or had a maple cupcake though. I thought this was a good time. I came across this recipe, and liked that it had maple in both the icing and the cupcake batter itself. Double maple. Lots of maple. I’d had some fabulous Canadian maple syrup from my Montreal trip that for some reason (??) I had not yet polished off. I figured no better time to put it to use.

The cake batter part was very easy and went according to plan. I didn’t do a trial run on these. The batter came out light and fluffy. I cookied each batch for 20 minutes according to the recipe and they came out a nice pale golden brown from the maple, like taking a vanilla cupcake and adding a smidge more brown into it. The icing would turn out to be the problem of this recipe.

Double Maple Cupcakes

I honestly can’t recall if I’ve done homemade icing before following a recipe. If I’m preparing icing, it’s usually a quick flavored confectioner’s sugar glaze for sugar cookies or for icing some breads or rolls. My mistake here I learned is that I went with the ingredients based on the proportions. Literally. Which next time I won’t do. I ended up making two batches of icing. The first batch came out stiff. It was hard to move and when I put it on the cupcakes, it was literally like putting down some hard Play Doh on them and trying to make it look pretty. I smudged it across the cupcakes (with the cupcakes trying to flake off throughout the process). They looked shiny and kind of interesting, but it wasn’t the fluffy pretty crown I was hoping for. In fact, I’d bought a pastry bag in hopes of making them look really nice, but that poor bag is still clogged up with remnants of icing batch 1 (the top 6 cupcakes in this photo).

Finished product (next to my sister's contribution for the event)

For the second batch of icing, I ended up halfing the amount of powdered sugar since it seemed to be what was doing the cupcakes in. Even that though seemed to be a bit too much, as the icing was sort of chunky and didn’t quite want to spread either. Both ways though were tasty, even if they did not lend themselves to the most spectacular of presentation. Add in the decorative skeleton topper and they couldn’t help but look tasty and seasonally festive. I was worried the icing wouldn’t lure people in, but they went fast! At 12 a cupcake, that batch was $24 towards the fabulous cause. Oh and PS the event ended up raising in excess of $1,100! Bravo!

What I loved about these cupcakes though is how it filled my apartment with the maple smell. And when I pulled out my carrier and removed the lid, it filled the room with the fresh scent of maple. I might alter the icing recipe or go with a different one altogether next time, but I do recommend for sure the cupcake recipe itself since it turned out so perfectly for me.

Here’s a video on the event. Should be more cupcake events here in NYC to come. If you missed it this time, stay tuned! There’s now a website, http://cupcakes4charity.org or http://twitter.com/cupcake4charity.