sprinkle-dipped vanilla yogurt cupcakes.

Crumbs and Cookies has reached 100 followers! Thank you all for the great support! I've never been so happy to have so many people stalking me (or this blog). Haha. Jokes aside, I never really thought that people would want to listen to the ramblings of a 15 year old, although I can't say that I didn't wish for that. So yay, C&C!

My search for the perfect vanilla cupcake is yes, still on going. Hopefully I'll be able to find the right one before getting sick of it. And also before I run out of different ways to frost the cupcakes. Speaking of decoration, how do you like the sprinkle-dipped idea? I think it's fabulous! It's so pretty and colourful, plus easy to do. No matter how imperfect your frosting skills are you'll easily cover it all up. And I really love the crunch the sprinkles give. The whole thing just forms this rainbow sugar shell that you sort of have to hack into it if you refrigerate the cupcake beforehand. Delicately, of course.

P.S. Does anyone else thinks hundreds and thousands have a fruity taste? These taste like banana to me.

The frosting is a salted butter icing that I chose because I thought the saltiness would give a nice contrast to the sweet sprinkles. I didn't have any salted butter on hand so I added some salt separately. I could have made it a little saltier, just to make the contrast more obvious.

And as if lacking of one of the two ingredients wasn't enough, I ran out of powdered sugar. Not totally but not enough to make the quantity of frosting I needed. I ended up having to substitute half the icing sugar with something I found in my pantry- snow powder. What is that anyway? I'll need to do a bit of research. (Obviously I wasn't the one who bought it.)

Now for the main star of the show- the cake itself. It's an adaptation of a recipe from Alice Medrich's low-fat baking book which I got from here. The texture was really cottony and fluffy. I've used many adjectives to describe vanilla cupcakes I've made and I swear that this is the only time I've used cottony. And the cupcakes really light, weight-wise and calorie-wise (sort of). The original was supposed to be part of a marble pound cake recipe so these cupcakes definitely have their shortcomings. I thought that it wasn't eggy enough and it needed more vanilla. Still, I see a lot of potential in it.

I have just one more vanilla cake recipe on my to-do list. I think I'll do a round up after that and finally determine my winner! Unless I happen to come across another potential recipe...

Low Fat Vanilla Yogurt Cupcakes
makes 8

1 cup cake flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 cup sugar
1 egg
3 tbsp unsalted butter
1/2 cup yogurt
1 tsp vanilla extract

Preheat oven to 350F. Line muffin tins with paper liners.

Whisk the dry ingredients together.

Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add in the egg and vanilla extract and beat to combine. Add in half the flour mixture and mix just until incorporated. Add in all the yogurt, mix to combine, and mix in the rest of the flour mixture until streaks of flour has just disappeared.

Portion out the batter and bake for about 15 minutes or until a skewer inserted comes out with moist crumbs attached.

Salted Butter Icing
adapted from Raspberri Cupcakes
ices 8 cupcakes, more or less

If you don't have salted butter, you can add 1/4 tsp of salt to every 1 stick of unsalted butter.

100g icing sugar, sifted
55g salted butter
extra salt to taste

Beat the butter until light and fluffy. Gradually add the icing sugar and mix to moisten before increasing the speed to high and beat until pale and fluffy. Add in extra salt if needed while mixing.