Come On Over, Cupcake!

Come On Over, Cupcake!: "A few weeks ago, the local supermarket put boxes of Pillsbury cake mix on sale, enticing shoppers with a price so low that even I, a girl with an avowed distaste for cakes from a box, couldn’t resist. I snapped up three boxes.

Two disappointing cupcake recipes later, I was ready to go in an entirely new direction with the remaining mix, one for devil’s food cake. I recalled a recipe I’d saved from a long-ago Hungry Girl newsletter for Yum Yum Brownie Muffins, a cupcake concoction that billowed high above the paper cup and yet had less than 200 calories."

(Via Well Fed Network.)

I forgot to mention it in the post that was published: Make sure you refrigerate these if you intend to keep them more than a week. They lasted about that long on the countertop here before going dotty. Two cupcakes were lost.

Next time, I'm going to buy either Betty Crocker or Duncan Hines mix to make this recipe. My mom always has sworn by Duncan Hines, so maybe that's the way to go.

If nothing else, Duncan Hines mix should also work for recipes from the Cupcake Doctor book, unlike Pillsbury mix. Pillsbury mix (as well as Betty Crocker mix) has pudding added, and nearly every recipe in that cookbook specifies mixes without pudding. After forging ahead anyway with two recipes, I ended up with cupcakes with custardy middles, sadly sunken despite a lot of extra baking time.

I might use one less egg were I forced to make them again with pudding cake mix, but frankly, I think the author should have specified how to adjust recipes to accommodate the two types of commercial cake mix. Or accept a sponsorship from Duncan Hines, as they're the only "plain" cake mix in the supermarket. It's also the most expensive of the three big brands, so you can see why it makes me bitter.

However, my issues with the Cupcake Doctor are largely irrelevant here (now that you've read the whole rant . . .). I plan to play around with these low-fat cupcakes to try to create variations with different and stronger flavors. I'll keep you posted.