heart in a cupcake.

This is too cute an idea to ignore so I simply had to try it out.

I cut out hearts from an extra layer of strawberry cake I had frozen and mixed up a vanilla cake batter from scratch. I wanted to use a chocolate cake batter but I was afraid that the heart shaped cake pieces wouldn't stand in such a watery consistency. The vanilla cake batter recipe I used is the one from hummingbird bakery, which I made before. The last time I mentioned that the crumb was too dry but after making it this time, it wasn't. In fact, it was extremely moist. I think it's because the butter was too cold when I mixed it into the flour the previous time.

However, like last time, the recipe didn't make 12 cupcakes. I managed to churn out only 11, and each cupcake portion actually had less batter than the stipulated amount because of the extra cake pieces I stuck in. So without the cut out cake pieces, I may have only been able to bake 8 or 9 cupcakes. I wonder why the discrepancy. Others seem to have no problem with the yield. Perhaps it's because my baking powder is not fresh enough? I may need to experiment again.

Surprisingly, the heart shaped cake pieces didn't dry out even though the top parts were exposed to direct oven heat. The batter was supposed to cover the exposed area but as I mentioned, I think there must be something wrong with the baking powder. There's not much harm done but you don't get the full surprise effect. On the bright side, at least it's easy to know where to slice the cupcake into half!