mizchef

posted by admin on Jul 2

Hi, kids. I have a real treat for you this week. I have invited Melynda Huskey to be my first guest blogger. Melynda is like the Martha Stewart of the West (and I mean that in the best possible sense), only without the criminal record. Her talents and skills run the gamete, from cooking to sewing to gardening to making paper lanterns that look like flowers. She’s a real Renaissance woman. If you want to check out her fabulousness, visit her blog, The Things That Make Us Happy Make Us Wise.

This past week, Melynda told me that she was going to be cooking for an impromptu wedding for her friend and that she would be making mehndi (henna tattoo) cupcakes instead of a wedding cake. I just about fell off my chair when I read that. And I thought, “Yes! That is what I want you to write about.” So, without further ado, here is my fabulous guest, Melynda Huskey, and her cupcakes.

Mehndi and Marigold Wedding Cupcakes

My life as a cook, which started in first grade with white sauce (and why?  I blame my maternal great-grandmother, a turn-of-the-century scientific homemaker whose brooding influence on our dusting, laundry-folding, and canning has not been one whit diminished by more than 40 years of death), has been always been punctuated by unpredictably intense states of obsession with achieving some perfect culinary object.  For five years I was a burden to my friends as I sought the perfect sugar cookie.   Before that, it was the perfect French Breakfast Roll (a sugar-and-cinnamon dipped muffin sacred to my childhood).  Sandwich bread.  Pie crust.  Jalapeno Creamed Spinach. One by one, I’ve nailed them, after arduous labor.

Except vanilla cupcakes.

I’m well known, in a small-town way, for my cupcakes. Everyone who has eaten my cooking has had a cupcake, and mostly, they’ve loved them.  Which would be great, of course, except that, honestly?  Not an achievement.  It’s just the soft tyranny of low expectations, to coin a phrase. Like a curly-headed child actor, all a cupcake has to do is show up in a cute outfit and wave.

But that’s not enough for me.  I want CUPCAKE.  Like this:  Perfectly mounded tops, with a sugary-crisp crust that yields to the teeth with just a hint of modest reluctance.  A moist, tender, clinging crumb, and a spongy, springy texture.  Yellow like a buttercup, a primrose, a bowl of thickly-clotted cream.  And with a fragrance of vanilla, butter, and first love.

The essence of cupcake.  It has eluded me for years. It has become my Holy Grail.

Three weeks ago, I found out that two dear friends had decided to get married, more or less on the spur of the moment—except they were going to have to do it at least twice, to accommodate everybody else’s physical, legal, and familial geography, and neither performance was going to suit them much.

“Come to our house,” I said. “We’ll have a nice picnic, Joan’s got her internet ministerial credentials, and . . .”

“You’ll make cupcakes??” asked the bride with a gleam in her eye, who once told a roomful of people that if I made cupcakes out of dirt, she’d be first in line to get one.

What else? Three weeks to the perfect cupcakes.  The happy couple had no wishes, although when I pressed her, the bride thought it would be fine if the cakes matched her outfit—turquoise and chocolate brown.

That was not enough for me.  These cupcakes needed to be perfect.  I wanted them to reflect the incredibly quirky, fraught, hilarious, geeky, adorable bride and groom, and their sweet, self-conscious devotion.  Somehow I wanted the cupcakes to contain every cool, weird, unpredictable thing that I love about these two.

Inspired by the bride’s gorgeous Indian silk stole, I settled on marigolds, the traditional Indian wedding flower, and turquoise-frosted cakes piped with bridal henna designs in chocolate frosting.  And the cake, snagged at the last moment from the King Arthur Flour website, uses a technique as off-center as my friends and as sweet.  Not perfect, but real—just like them.

Adorably Odd Vanilla Cupcakes (freely adapted from King Arthur Flour’s Golden Vanilla Cake)

Two hours or so before you want to make your cake, take out all the ingredients and line them up on the counter to reach room temperature.  When you start mixing the cake, preheat the oven to 350 F.

2 cups sugar
3 ¼ cups all-purpose unbleached flour
2 ½ teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
¾ cup (1 ½ sticks) butter
1 ¼ cups milk
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 teaspoon high-quality bourbon
4 large eggs

Sift the dry ingredients into the mixer bowl.  On low speed, beat in the very soft butter.  It’ll look and feel like you could make a great sand castle with it. Pour in the milk, vanilla, and bourbon and mix at medium speed for one minute.

Add the eggs one at a time, beating thoroughly between each addition.

Fill your paper-lined cupcake tins about 2/3 full.  You should easily get 24 cupcakes.  I got 2 dozen plus an 8” square pan that the kids ate at snack time. Bake them about 20 minutes, but watch them carefully in the last few minutes.  Nothing is sadder than a dry, overbaked cuppie.

Frost however you like.