This week’s project had a ‘meh’ turnout. The cupcakes weren’t terrible (or inedible like the cupcakes from a few weeks ago), but they weren’t spectacular or even exactly what I was expecting.

I decided a few weeks ago that I should try to make a cupcake that imitated the taste of a Hostess Twinkie. I knew I’d need yellow sponge cake and cream filling. I went online, thinking that surely someone had posted a recipe for this, but the closest thing I could find incorporated squash into the recipe. That’s right – squash. As in the vegetable. Now, I like vegetables as much as the next person, and I won’t turn down a good carrot cake, but squash in a cupcake?! That’s crazy talk.

So I figured I’d just create my own recipe. Find a yellow sponge cake recipe, find a cream filling recipe, put b. into a. and voila – Twinkie-style cupcake.

Alas, like many dreams, this one did not pan out.

For starters, the recipe called for twelve egg yolks. Yup, just the yolks. I have since learned that most sponge cake recipes incorporate the whites into the yolks. The whites from my eggs just went into the trash.

Into this egg yolk mess was added some water and that was beaten together for a few minutes. Sugar was then added and beaten, and the rest of the dry ingredients and vanilla were folded in. I ended up with a pretty thick batter, but I was still optimistic:

I filled up the cupcake tins and popped them in the oven. The baking time was a bit of a mystery. The original recipe called for pouring the batter into a Bundt pan and baking it for 30 minutes, so I started checking it at 10 minutes. I inserted a knife into a cupcake and it came out smothered in batter. I checked again at 15 minutes. Same thing. I checked again at 20, and at that point I had to take them out. The knife was still a little dirty, but I could tell the outsides of the cupcakes were dangerously close to burning.

The cupcakes were definitely in the oven too long, but I don’t know what I could have done about it. The outsides were baking a lot faster than the insides. They ended up waaaay too dry, although not inedible. It just takes a good amount of bite pressure to get through the crunchy outside. The cupcakes tasted fine, they just were too dry and heavy.

Next came the cream filling. Mixing it up was no problem, and it tasted fine. I put it into a piping bag fitted with a larger tip and tried to push it through the tops of the cupcakes. That wasn’t happening. The pastry bag tip would not penetrate the cupcakes. So I cut a little hole in the tops of the cupcakes and tried that. I thought I was filling the cupcakes, but I was not. There was barely any cream filling inside. So I ended up just frosting the cupcakes with the filling.

In the end, my tasters said the cupcakes tasted fine. They definitely did not imitated Twinkies, and I don’t think I’ll be taking the extras into work (the recipe made only 13 cupcakes to begin with) for my co-workers. I’m not that proud of this particular project.

Stay tuned next week when I’ll be turning back to bread and attempting to make a Chocolate Marbled Brioche Loaf.