X and O Valentine's Day Cupcakes

X and Os Valentine's Day Cupcakes

OK - I was not going to make these cupcakes this week I was going to save them for coloser to Valentine's Day but I wanted to make the swiss meringue butter cream icing in order to figure out what went wrong with Leah's.

As you can see my icing turned out great! It took a long time and the whites never did form stiff peeks. I beat them for 20 minutes and whne they were still flacide at best I figures that it was all ready ruined. But it was fine after another 20 minutes for beating the icing all of a sudden separated and looked curdled. I was being sprayed from head to toe with icing as my heat safe bowl is not that big and Brad, my son, was trying to cover my clothes as I was leaving in a few minutes for a fundraising event. I got mad and started to whip the beater around and I could see some of the icing reforming and it smoothed right out. I took the bowl and immediately put it in a huge bowl of ice water and used my spatula to evenly fold the icing over and over until all the bubbles were gone. The icing got thicker and thicker (it's been in my fridge for two days and it is like a rock). It was easy to use but I did not put it in an icing bag and I put the cupcakes in the fridge because I felt the icing was softening sitting on the warm counter.

This time around I used straight corn flour instead of wheat flour and I had some suprising results. It did not rise very much which I did not expect and it would need more vanilla flavouring in future, too. The first cupcake I had (

hot out of the oven with no icing) was wonderful soft and firm no crumbling at all. But after they sat on the counter to cool and they were iced the cake was a little too dry (good thing for the super buttery icing). Next I am going to try a brown rice and corn flour blend to see if I can get a better consistency.

The cupcakes and the icing stated that they made 28 of each and I know that my family will have a hard time eating 12 so I cut all the ingredient in half and there was WAY to much icing. As Mindy noted the icing amounts are insanely huge.

The cupcakes themselves were very simple to make, they are simply the vanilla cupcakes.

My kids went crazy for these cupcakes. Angel licked all the icing off her cupcake and grudgingly ate the cake. Bradley loves them so much he has eaten 5. He says that they are the just all around very good cupcakes even if they are a little dry. Mike really likes the icing but he was a bit taken back by the corn-ish flavour of the cupcakes and he did not like that they were dry (I don't think they would have been dry if you made them with regular flour). I liked the cinnamon hearts they made the whole thing come together.

I loved this cupcake!