I am horrifically indecisive. Going out for meals with me is really quite a traumatic experience because everyone else has chosen what they want to eat and are hungry and I take at least half an hour to reach a decision and I change my mind at least six times and then usually go back to my first choice and everyone else sits there getting more and more hungry while I dither. It's the same when it comes to clothes. A hundred outfits later I'm back in the one I started with. It also causes issues when choosing cocktails because they all sound so yummy I can never choose and everyone always complain of dieing of cocktail drought while I dither over the menu and then at some point in the evening I invariably decide that really it's my civic duty to just stop fussing and try them all which normally leaves me with quite a sore head the next day.
So when I arrived home, having dumped my rucksack (never want to see that beast again) had a very long bath and caught up on some sleep, the first thing I did was bake. Well, at any rate, this was my intention. But then I ran up against my usual dilemma: indecision. What to make?? Ohh what to make, what to make. It was hell. Literal hell. All I wanted to do was bake but couldn't for the life of me make a decision as to what I actually wanted to make. Dither, dither. There are just so many possibilities!! And then, as always happens, I got really horrifically (perhaps excessively) stressed about making the wrong decision because what if I make a coffee cake but really the perfect thing to make is macaroons? This was a big issue for the whole choosing a uni debacle. What if I made the wrong decision and the love of my life went to York and I've picked Bristol and then we never meet because I chose the wrong uni and so then I marry someone I don't really love and suffer ten unhappy years of marriage before a messy divorce leaves two kids in a mentally unsound state and myself on the shelf, an old unlovable spinster with six Border Terriers all because I put Bristol on my UCAS form instead of York and oh my goodness isn't life horribly random and stressful and I think I better sit down.
But before I reached this state of frazzled terror because omg fate exists but I might miss it because I catch the wrong bus, I realised that cake isn't one of those life changing, can-only-do-once type of things. You can make endless cake. So that's what I did. I made everything. Well, I made hundreds of cupcakes with hundreds of flavours. My poor mother's very clean kitchen was a total mess. And there she had been, saying she'd missed me.
Basically, I made it up as I went along, randomly choosing ingredients to add to our basic cupcake mixture (http://elliemaybakes.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/less-is-more.html)
I raided the fridge and the cupboards for exciting things to make into exciting flavours. Nothing was left undisturbed. It got sooooo messy it was actually incredible. I suddenly stopped and was like, woah. As I say, my mum was thrilled to have me back.
I multiplied by five (yes, really) the normal mixture - is there a word for multiplying something by five?? I'm feeling there should be, like quadruple, in fact there probably definitely is, but I don't know it so sorry about that. Answers on a postcard please - and then divided it into eight bowls so that all ten flavours had enough mixture to produce six cupcakes.
And then I went insane and added:
One mashed banana and a tablespoon of honey. For some reason (don't ask me why there is probably some very serious science behind it) this took aaaaaaaaaaaages to cook. About double the normal time but I just sort of randomly tested with my trusty skewer as I went along.
A cup of mashed blueberries (also, when I say mashed, I whizzed it with the hand held blender because, as I think I might have mentioned before, I have a lotta love for that thing. But you could totes do it with a fork too. Its just not quite as fun)
A handful of glace cherries (the juice makes the cupcakes really good so use that too! This was my taste testers fave, apparently)
Two tablespoons of coco powder and a handful of chocolate chips. This is quite a lot of chocolate for such a small quantity of cake mix (although, to be honest, measurements were going a bit wayward at this point so it might actually have been more. I was just sort of chucking it in) so it made uber chocolaty cupcakes but no one was complaining
Orange zest, which I then iced with white chocolate ganache. OMG. I thought I might die it was so yummy.
Strawberry jam. I baked some with jam in the mix and some I put jam in once cooked, and then topped with cream. Both were pretty tasty and quite a cool twist on scones with jam and cream. My mum was a big fan at any rate.
A tablespoon of cooled coffee. I love coffee cake strong so I heap up the coffee and use very little water (you don't want to use too much otherwise the mix goes runny and the consistency of the cake goes dodge. You wouldn't want that now, would you?) and then add a teaspoon of cooled coffee instead of milk to buttercream icing.
Peanut butter. OBVIOUSLY. This whole exercise would have basically been a pile of metaphorical poo if peanut butter hadn't entered in somewhere. And then I made Ellie's peanut butter icing too (http://elliemaybakes.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/chocolate-and-peanut-butter-cupcakes.html) because in my opinion there is no such thing as too much peanut butter and so peanut butter flavoured cupcake with peanut butter icing is definitely not peanut butter overload. I unfortunately made wayyyy too much so had the really very traumatic task of eating all the unused peanut butter icing which was really quite scarring. I used crunchy for the cake mix and smooth for the icing. And now I'll stop talking about peanut butter before I actually turn into a jar of peanut butter or something.
A tablespoon of dessicated coconut which, when also used in the icing, made a fab creamy texture to the buttercream and a really nice light flavour because I often think that coconut is too strong a flavour to actually be nice. But that's just my opinion, go mental with the coconut if you want. Totally up to you, which is kind of the beauty of this indecisive cupcake mayhem.
I kept one batch as your basic vanilla cupcake and decorated with your basic buttercream icing. Sometimes a bit of simplicity in a world (ok, kitchen) of chaos is a good thing.
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| Indecision can sometimes lead to beautiful (or yummy at least) things |
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| Cherry and blueberry |
And there you have it. My day in the kitchen was amaaaaaazing and really quite a genius way of solving my indecision. If only all decisions could be solved by just giving everything a go. But no, I think some decisions have just got to be made and stuck with. Fate will totally direct me to the love of my life anyway. I hope. I eternally hope...
Anyway, enough musing on the existence of fate and soul mates, I hope these have inspired you. There's definitely way more to be tried (I've just thought that ginger would be nice, or maybe even fudge and ooh! I wonder what would happen if you put marshmallows in??) so go mental. Think of it as a science experiment: it's all in a good cause.
Just don't expect a tidy kitchen. You have been warned.
Ros xx
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| I tidied up and arranged flowers so my mum couldn't hate me too much for the mess... |
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