How to Prepare Cupcakes

Cupcakes need to be prepared in a very specific way if the end result is going to be even half as good as you hope. Prepare cupcakes the proper way with help from a two-time winner of Food Network's Cupcake Wars in this free video clip.

Video Transcript

Hi, I'm Arleen from Sweet Arleens here in Westlake Village and today, I have with me Julia, our Executive Pastry Chef. "Hi!" We're going to be baking one of the recipes from the book that we've just contributed to Handstand Kids with of that Gar, Garfield and we've contributed a few different recipes to the book as well as I wrote the forward and we just enjoyed having a book launch here in Westlake Village a few weeks ago. And the carrot walnut is a delicious comfort food great for kids of all ages. So, we've chosen this product to share with you in how to make a cupcake. So, we're going to begin with showing our wet ingredients and our dry ingredients. The combination first that Julia is going to illustrate is a half a cup of dark brown sugar and a half a cup of granulated sugar. Mix with our fat, in this case it's going to be vegetable oil. Pure vegetable oil that we'll be adding, "Three quarters of cup of it", okay, three quarters of a cup. This recipe is so simple. You don't need to have a fancy mixture. You can use a whisk just like Julia is doing or you can put it in your mixture at home. "In fact, it's better than by hand 'cause you don't want air incorporated more than it has to be." Okay. So, next, we'll be adding two eggs and we always put our eggs, we always crack our eggs in a separate container before adding to our mixture. Why? "To make sure there's no egg shells in there." Absolutely. "That's a quick visual." Okay. So, now, we're set to start to add some of our dry ingredients. So, Julia, how much flour are we going to add? "We have one cup of flour, "okay", to start. To spice it up, we have a teaspoon of cinnamon, "oh beautiful", throw in that in there, "absolutely." And then we have a, a teaspoon of salt." Alright, I've got the salt. "And half a teaspoon of baking soda." Okay, and again, all the ingredients are measured out and then they're listed again in the cookbook. "Right." "And this you can all measure together beforehand and then it just goes right into the wet mixture." Okay. And we're going to continue to use our whisk to blend the dry ingredients into our liquids. "Yeah." Hmmm, I can already smell that cinnamon as you're blend, "Absolutely", as you're whisking that Julia. "Yes." Now, as far as the addition for flavor, we've chosen, this is a carrot walnut cake, so we have grated carrots as well as chopped walnuts. You can either buy grated carrots and chopped walnuts already done for you or of course, you can just get your own grater and knife out and take care of both. "Here at the bakery we use a food processor." Right to do, to do all of our carrots, right? "Yes." I always hear that going. "Yeah." Okay. So, with that, we're going to set our whisk aside and switch over to a spoon or spatula. "Awesome. And then, once you have all the wet and dry ingredients, you're just going to fold in the carrots, "okay", and the walnuts. I don't personally like walnuts, so, I can either recommend leaving this out or using pecans." Okay. Or for those with nut-free allergies, again, you can just leave out nuts altogether. Okay, we're going to go ahead and just quickly fold the carrots and walnuts into the batter. We don't want to over mix the batter or we risk it being dry. And then, when we're ready, we're going to go ahead and scoop it out into our cupcake tin. Of course we have really large cupcake tins at the bakery at Sweet Arleens, but we got a home size one here for you today. We want to ensure that we're, that we filled the cupcake liners about halfway full to result in a very even cupcake with room for icing. "To get the perfect portion, we use a number 16 scoop, all scoops have a number and as long as it's full all the way to the top without overflowing, something like that, "hmmm, that looks great", it's going to be perfect." "These carrot ones are a little bit messy 'cause they kind of hang over the side, but guaranteed a delicious, moist product every time." They don't look messy here at all Julia. "Right". Alright, now we've preheated our oven to 350 degrees, it's already heated, ready to go. Julia is going to pop it in the oven and we're going to bake those for about 24 minutes. But again, depending on your own oven at home, it maybe a minute here or there short or over. So, now, we're going to show our baked cupcakes, our baked carrot walnuts and showing those ice and we chose cream cheese icing at the bakery. These are actually a product that we sell here. And oh, those look wonderful Julia. "Yey!" So, making cupcakes is fun, it's easy, it's important to read your recipe thoroughly. But the carrot walnut cupcake is a taste of comfort. Enjoy. "Cheers!"