Snickerdoodle Cupcakes – Just in Time For Valentines!

I know what Jan felt like on the Brady Bunch.

Martha.

Martha, Martha, MARTHA!

Except I’m not talking about Marsha, I’m talking about Martha “let’s make everything difficult” Stewart!

I have her cookie cookbook and let me tell you, the cookies recipes have very detailed recipes and guess what?

So does the cupcake book.

But, I have to hand it to her, they’re good.

Tori had been wanting to make these Snickerdoodle Cupcakes ever since she got me this cookbook for my birthday.

So we made them.

Let me say up front – you only want to make these the day you’re going to eat them (due to the frosting), just like Martha recommends.  And we all know we should really listen to Martha.

Don’t we?

So to start, we needed cake flour.  Do you think we had cake flour?

Heck no!

So we improvised by sifting regular flour and adding a little cornstarch.  You can do this by dumping one tablespoon of cornstarch into a cup of flour and then filling it the rest of the way with regular all-purpose flour.  Then sift it five times.

We sifted twice.

Cuz we are under achievers.  And we added a teaspoon of ground cinnamon as well.

Now turn your electric mixer on high speed.  Dump one cup of butter into your mixing bowl along with  1 3/4 cup of sugar and beat until pale and fluffy and then crack in one of  four eggs.

Mix it up a bit, then crack in another egg.  We actually cracked all four in a  bowl first, and then dumped them in one by one.  Tori and I together spell c-a-l-a-m-i-t-y, so we try to take precautions.  And that girl moves so fast, I barely could get a picture of anything.

Add in two teaspoons of vanilla extract.  Use the good stuff, not the imitation.

Mix this up a little, and then you’re going to add your five two-time sifted cake flour, one cup at a time and alternate each cup with one one-fourths cup of milk while mixing on low until all is mixed in well. We didn’t really use rocket science to divide the milk into thirds, we just dumped a little bit each time.

Dump in one and a half cups of  cinnamon flavored baking chips.  Shhhh!   These were not in Martha’s recipe, but we added them anyway.

Line a muffin tin with some liners and scoop some batter into each one.

Fill your liners about 3/4 of the way full and try to pretend like you don’t see that my muffin liners are Winnie the Pooh.  Pretend like they have pretty red hearts on them…

It was a bad day..nothing went right.  It’s all the corner store had in stock.

Pop them into the oven and bake them at 350º for 20 minutes. After 20 minutes, take them out and let them cool.

Now for the crazy part.

Martha’s Seven Minute Frosting.

It’s called Seven  Minute Frosting because after you go through making a soft boil candy, you drizzle the candy into some whipped eggs whites and then beat it for seven minutes.

On the stove, we brought 1 and 1/2 cups of sugar, 2 tablespoons light corn syrup,  and 2/3 cup of water to boil.  We also stuck a candy thermometer onto our pan.

We whisked until the sugar dissolved and let it softly bubble until the syrup temperature reached 230º.

While I was making the syrup, Tori was mixing up 6 egg whites and 2 tablespoons of sugar up with the KitchenAid.  They were supposed to be room temperature, another problem, so we just put them into a bowl of warm water for a few minutes.  We couldn’t let Martha defeat us!

Once the candy had reached it’s temperature, we removed it from the heat.  By now, the egg whites resembled meringue, and we slowly drizzled the syrup down the side of the bowl into them.

And then…

We let this mix on medium-high speed for seven minutes.  Thank God for KitchenAid.  If I’d had to hand mix this, I’d have wanted to grit my teeth.

After seven minutes, it looked like this.

It was shiny and had stiff peaks, just like Martha said it would.

So we scooped some into a pastry bag and began to frost our cupcakes with it.

Problem #17, our icing didn’t go on as pretty as Martha’s did.

Probably because we didn’t use the Wilton #1A tip we were supposed to use.  But we figured it didn’t matter on our Winnie the Pooh cupcakes.  We’d already blown perfection.

But then…we tasted them.

And all was well and right in the world.

For Martha’s Printable Recipe –Snickerdoodle Cupcakes

I think next time, cinnamon cream cheese icing would be fabulous.  And it’ll keep for more than a day.  The cupcakes themselves were wonderful, as was the frosting, but by that evening, the frosting was like a hard lump of old marshmallow.

Make some of these for your sweetie on Valentines if you can stand the challenge…

But fresh out of the oven with that frosting?

Yummy!