Transcript
Hi, my name is Amanda Oakleaf. I am owner, head-baker and decorator at Amanda Oakleaf Cakes’ in Winthrop, Massachusetts; where we do cupcakes, custom cakes, wedding cakes, birthday cakes, anything you could think of we can make it into a cake. And today, I’ll be talking to you about baking cupcakes. There are a few tips to keep in mind before the cake even makes it into the oven. You want to start with the freshest ingredients. You have everything at room temperature; the butter, the egg, the milk; especially the butter that makes the whip up nice. Having all the ingredients at room temperature really ensures that everything mixes together smoothly in the batter, so that’s a good place to start. And then from there you want to make sure that your pan, whether it’s a cake pan or a cupcake pan, is prepared before you start the batter. You want to give it a light coating of baking spray, just in case any of the batter gets onto the pan, it won’t stick or burn. And then have your cupcake liners inside the cups. If you happen to have a non-stick pan, then you can just skip this spray all together. You want to make sure all the other ingredients are measured the same. So determine whether the recipe wants you to measure all the ingredients by weight, what should be pounds or ounces or if they need to be measured by volume, which would be cups and tablespoons and teaspoons. You don’t want them get confused or do both in the same recipe, because a cup of sugar weighs more than a cup of flour. So don’t be confused by the trick question of a pound of feathers v/s a pound of gold, which weighs more? They’re the same because you can’t confuse between pounds and cups. And then while filling the pans you want to make sure that you put the same amount of batter into each one, we do this by using ice-cream scoop; that way our cupcakes bake up the same size and also display really nicely. And those are the tips before the oven.
