Frosting is the best part of a cupcake

For realz. No lies. Cake is good. Frosting makes it great.

I had a pretty cupcake-heavy couple of weeks a little while ago and I’ve been meaning to post a bit about them here, so it’s about time to finally catch up! And really, who doesn’t love cupcakes? People without souls, that’s who.

A few weeks ago I took a class on how to bake the perfect cupcake at the Boston Center for Adult Education. That’s where those gorgeous cupcakes came from. Honestly, the class was more practical than instruction, but the recipes were great and the instructor was pretty cool. She has a cooking blog as well, Creative Confectionary and I’m sure I’ll be trying more of her recipes soon. We made vanilla, chocolate, and banana cupcakes.

In seemingly unrelated news (appearances can be tricky), I’ve been taking a public speaking course through my company. One of the speech types we practiced is the Instructional Speech. Frosting the cakes at cupcake class gave me the idea of doing my last public speaking assignment as an instructional speech on cupcake frosting. Michelle graciously let me use her kitchen for operation cupcake preparations. As it turns out, one box of mix makes close to, if not more than, 80 mini-cupcakes. They were adorable.

Yes, I used boxed cake mix again. And I’ll tell you why. The focus was on the frosting. I needed to make the frosting from scratch, and box cake is just so damned reliable. One of these days I’ll make a whole layer cake from scratch and we’ll all ooh and aaah at my prowess.

On to the frosting! Butter cream is universal. It goes on all cakes. It’s very simple to make. Butter + sugar + some liquid = frosting. I promise.

Easy Butter Cream Frosting

I used:

• 2 sticks of butter
• One pound (one whole box) of confectioners’ / powdered sugar
• Vanilla extract
• Milk for proper consistency

Really, two sticks of butter. Keep in mind: this made more than enough butter cream for those 80 mini-cakes. This is enough for a layer cake at least. We ended up having a post-speech frosting party, and then another little frosting party at home. I’m still kind of frosting-ed out.

Once the butter is about room temperature and soft but not melting, put it in your mixer or cream it by hand (this means mash it about with a wood spoon or something) until it’s fluffy-ish. When soft and fluffy, add the sugar in small batches.

Don’t add the next batch until the previous one is incorporated, otherwise you may end up covered in powdered sugar.

You may have to scrape down the sides of the bowl to get all the sugar in there. If you are using a faulty spatula, it might come apart on you. *Ahem*

Once all your sugar and butter are together, it’s butter cream. You can now add colors or flavoring, but do so SPARINGLY. A little goes a long way. Start with small amounts and add until the flavor or color is right. It’s a lot easier to add more color or flavoring than it is to fix a mistake. You can also add milk at this point to thin out the frosting if it’s too thick for your intents.

“What intents?” you might ask. Well, in our case, piping! I usually use a piping bag, but you can also use a zip-top bag.

Piping with Butter Cream Frosting

Fold the bag over your hand, like so, so that there is a cone on the inside of your hand, and the opening folds around your thumb and knuckle.

Fill with butter cream up to your hand, and then unfold the plastic back up. Twist at where the butter cream ends and pinch it there. Now you can snip off the end and use it to frost things! You want to make sure you keep it twisted, or it’ll all come flying out the back and you’ll get frosting all over the place (believe me, I spent the rest of my work day with frosting on me…uncool).

When piping frosting, I squeeze the frosting from the bag with my dominant hand, and then guide the bag with my other hand. I do this to control the thickness and speed of frosting, but if you have a more comfortable way, go for it!

They don’t look like much (I’m not well-versed in ziplock-frosting maneuvers) but they were scrumptious.

See, Nate kept stealing them.

Once you get the hang of it, you can pipe lines and dots and dotted lines and all sorts of fancy things!

If you hold the bag at 90 degrees to the surface, squeeze, pull up, and release pressure, you can make dots.

If you hold at about 45 degrees and drag, you can make frosting lines . My roommate wrote my name on a bunch of cookies and then we ate them.

Or, you can just pile the frosting up and consume (the best step in all cooking projects).

Chomp!