Why There Will Never Be a Cupcake Recipe

I don't like cake.

Really, it's the icing that's the problem: too sweet, buttercream tastes like butter, cream cheese is okay but altogether it's too sweet. In fact, my best friend of over a decade is the only one I trust to bring me a birthday cake--she knows it’s strawberry cake with whipped cream “frosting” or nothing at all!

And then we get into cupcakes. A cupcake is quite obviously just a small adorable cake, right? My dislike gets carried over. The rare times that I do eat a cupcake, my husband--who upon occasion eats a tub of icing with a spoon--gets the topping off of mine. That is why on this blog you will probably never see a recipe for cupcakes.

But there is another reason as well that is based less upon my taste buds and more upon my sanity.

When my uncle got married over a year ago, he did me the honor of asking me to make the cupcakes for his reception. One hundred-fifty miniature masterpieces. Well, originally he asked me for a wedding cake, but have you ever tried to make a wedding cake? I couldn't even get it flattened enough! And really I have no patience for smoothing out icing. So cupcakes it was!

I was super jazzed, loading my notebook with flavor ideas and ingredients lists and unnecessary design doodles. And there were parts of it that were a lot of fun.

Troy, and his new wife, Ashley’s "wedding party-only” cupcakes were a dozen lemon cupcakes with a fresh blackberry icing, which were amazing. The other hundred and fifty were simple chocolate and white cupcakes with a vanilla buttercream made grey with a little coloring (their colors with grey and purple).

To the heart of this story: piping a hundred and fifty cupcakes an hour before the reception. Having never liked icing myself, I was not as proficient as I thought I would be at actually using it. I had made the buttercream the night before and refrigerated it and it was not as soft as it needed to be. So the first 10 minutes was spent massaging the ziplock bags and seething silently.

I had also (thankfully!) enlisted the help of my mom and sister so a store-run proved necessary (I really don’t know how I thought we were all going to share one piping tip), plus all the baggies we were loading with icing kept bursting. And that many cupcakes to ice ended up being way more time-consuming than I anticipated--I’ll admit by the end of it I was cursing like a sailor.

The experience was completely worth it, my uncle and his new wife were so happy. I had multiple wedding guests coming up to me gushing about the presentation and taste, and watched people from afar munching cupcake after cupcake in the buffet line.

But no more cupcakes, no thank you, not ever. In fact! My parents asked me to do cupcakes for their 30th wedding anniversary last year... They were quickly and lovingly rejected.

Behold instead! A nice, simple recipe for Wheat Cherry-Oatmeal Cookies that requires no piping bags, little pre-planning and a lot less sugar and butter!