Fresh | Fun with cupcakes!

I haven't made a cake from scratch in my memory. In fact the last memorable homemade cake I can think of is a chocolate cake my sister made that did not rise and ended up like very thick chocolate bread that went straight to the trash. Tragic. So I decided to go all out for my return to baking and tackle some fancy-pants cupcakes. For these cakes I used three recipes: the lavender cupcakes were adapted from an online recipe from Shape magazine, the strawberry cupcakes were adapted from pink lady cake at smittenkitchen.com, and cream cheese frosting from simplyrecipes.com.

I started with the lavender cupcakes, which the recipe claimed were healthy. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Start out with 1 C flour (I used all-purpose) and add 1 tsp. baking powder, 1/4 tsp. salt and 1 1/2 tbsp. dried lavender buds, chopped. I just chopped the heck out of them because I didn‚t want to run into some crunchy bits in an otherwise soft cupcake. In another bowl, beat together 3 tbsp. butter and 3/4 C sugar. The recipe says to use an electric mixer and beat until light and fluffy. Then add 1 egg, 2 tbsp. lemon juice and 1 tbsp. lemon zest. Save the lemon, it‚ll be good to squeeze down your drain and freshen things up after the cupcake extravaganza has totally trashed your kitchen. Beat in 1/2 C buttermilk. Or, if you don‚t have buttermilk, take just under a cup of regular milk and add 1 tbsp. lemon juice (so handy since you saved it!) and let it sit for 5 min. Presto. Add 1/2 C of that to the batter and mix it up. Bake in cute paper cupcake liners, filled about 3/4 full, in a muffin pan. Bake 20-26 minutes, until a toothpick in the center comes out clean. This recipe only made about 7 cupcakes for me. It made me wonder if this is why they were considered healthy, because really, how much damage can 7 cupcakes do?

The strawberry recipe made many many many more. Enough to put you in a sugar coma. Start with 4 1/2 C cake flour. OK, I used all-purpose, but I will talk about that modification later. Stir in 3 C sugar, 5 1/4 tsp. baking powder and 3/4 tsp. salt. Now, blend 3 sticks (yep, nothing healthy about these) of soft butter and 1 1/2 C pureed strawberries. I used frozen sliced berries and didn‚t notice until later that they had sugar added. Frozen whole berries would work well too, just thaw them before dropping them into the blender. Blend these and mix the buttery strawberry mixture into the flour. Now, be realistic and just take a 1/2 C to 1 C of batter and put it in a bowl. This will be your batter-eating bowl. If you just scoop directly from the big bowl, you will never stop eating the batter, it is insanely good. Also, it is probably better to eat the batter before you add the eggs. In yet another bowl, mix up 8 egg whites and 2/3 C milk and a drop or 2 of red food dye (to make your cakes prettier!). After you have eaten all of the raw batter you want, add in the egg whites and stir everything together. Now, at this point, I baked 2 batches, which came out horribly. After re-reading the directions, I realized I had not used cake flour and the batter probably needed much more flour. I added some until I had a thick gloppy batter (rather than a thin, slimy batter) and they came out perfectly. Bake at 350 for about 20-25 minutes.

Now for the frosting. The hardest part of this is the mixing. For one recipe, mix 1 stick (1/2 C) butter and 8 oz. cream cheese. Yes, I used the low-fat stuff and was fully aware of the irony of buying low-fat cream cheese for a recipe that called for 3 sticks of butter. Regardless, mix that together until your arm is sore, but don‚t strain yourself -- you'll need that arm to lift cupcakes to your mouth later. Add 2 to 3 C powdered sugar, mix some more. Lastly, add 1 tsp. vanilla. For the icing for the strawberry cupcakes, I added the contents of 1 teabag of chai tea to spice it up a little. Orange zest would be yummy too.

I collapsed after making these, but cupcakes are cute and easy to share and brighten everyone's day. So share a little cupcake love, kick back and make someone else clean up the kitchen.

* Fresh is photo/food column by Yakima Herald-Republic photographer Sara Gettys. To see Sara's tips on food photography, visit the photo blog at yakimaheraldphotos.com