Billy’s Vanilla Vanilla Cupcakes
Posted by BakeandDestroy on June 21st, 2007. Filed under: baking on TV, cupcake recipes.
Originally uploaded by Bake & Destroy!
I have the same taste in cupcakes as your average four-year-old. I like yellow, as buttery as I can get, with vanilla buttercream and sprinkles. Basic, cute and sweet. This recipe might be the best-reviewed cupcake recipe of all time. Every baking blog raves about it, so who am I to disagree? I even forgot the butter until the last second and had to try to mash it in there without overmixing the flour and they still turned out fluffy and yellow and buttery as ever.
I topped mine with, in the case of these fluffy pink cupcakes, with left over vegan buttercream dyed pink and topped with cherry candies. I also topped some with whipped cream and fondant shark fins, which you can check out in my Flickr pictures.
Anyway, for the millionth time on the Internet, here’s the recipe for Billy’s Vanilla Vanilla Cupcakes:
- 1 3/4 cups cake flour, not self-rising
- 1 1/4 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
- 2 cups sugar
- 1 tablespoon baking powder
- 3/4 teaspoon salt
- 1 cup unsalted butter, cut into 1-inch cubes
- 4 large eggs
- 1 cup whole milk
- 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
Then you:
1. Preheat oven to 325°. Line cupcake pans with paper liners; set aside. In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, combine flours, sugar, baking powder, and salt; mix on low speed until combined. Add butter, mixing until just coated with flour.
2. 2. In a large glass measuring cup, whisk together eggs, milk, and vanilla. With mixer on medium speed, add wet ingredients in 3 parts, scraping down sides of bowl before each addition; beat until ingredients are incorporated but do not overbeat.
3. Divide batter evenly among liners, filling about two-thirds full.
4. Bake, rotating pan halfway through, until a cake tester inserted in the center comes out clean, 17 to 20 minutes.
5. Transfer to a wire rack to cool completely. Repeat process with remaining batter.
I still have a dozen in my freezer, and I read they keep well in there if they’re wrapped properly. I’m going to decorate them with my niece this week end. Really you could top these with anything, but I think your favorite chocolate or vanilla buttercream would be best.
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June 21st, 2007 at 6:58 am
Glad to hear you liked them! I dig the recipe a lot, I tend to alter it slightly though with sifting, superfine sugar, & more vanilla or other added extracts. It’s an awesome base recipe.
August 4th, 2007 at 2:35 pm
[...] was going to make brownies, and I was going to make cupcakes, of course. I decided on the Billy’s Vanilla Vanilla Cupcake recipe that I found on Bake & Destroy. If you haven’t noticed, I kinda default to her [...]
September 10th, 2007 at 4:07 am
Hello, I love your blog! (and you!) BUT . . . I also had a disaster with this recipe and found it kind of coarse and weird, and I looked online and it looks like most versions of this recipe call for one tablespoon of baking powder, not two. So maybe that is part of the problem? (Another part was that I used 0nly all-purpose flour and overfilled the cups!)
July 30th, 2009 at 7:48 am
[...] cake recipe is based on Billy’s Vanilla Vanilla Cupcakes from Bake and Destroy. I omit the cake flour, add more vanilla and reduce the sugar by 1/4 for [...]