MSC: Snickerdoodle Cupcakes

This month Katie of Katiecakes chose snickerdoodle cupcakes as our selection for the Martha Stewart Cupcakes Club.  I like snickerdoodle cookies a lot – what’s not to like about cinnamon and sugar, right? – but I rarely make them, so I was excited about this pick.  Even better, Kayte, Margaret and I had the opportunity to bake our cupcakes together via Twitter, which always makes things more fun!  

Like most of the recipes in Martha’s Cupcakes book, this one yielded way more cupcakes than I needed (28), so I scaled back to make just 1/4.  The cupcake recipe is essentially a basic yellow cake with the addition of a healthy dose of cinnamon.  I overfilled the tins (a nasty habit of mine, one I’m trying to break) so the edges of my cupcakes were a bit browner than I’d have liked, but otherwise they baked up perfectly.  I’d sampled the batter, and while it was a yummy yellow cake batter, I didn’t think it tasted like a snickerdoodle.  After baking, however, the cinnamon flavor intensified and the cupcakes tasted just like the cookies they were based on.  

Martha suggests a simple seven-minute frosting to top the cupcakes so that’s what I went with.  Seven-minute frosting is made by boiling sugar and water until the resulting syrup reaches 230 F then adding it to a mixer containing egg whites that have been beaten to soft peaks with a bit of sugar.  The last step is just to beat the frosting until it has cooled down and stiff peaks have formed, which in theory takes seven minutes, hence the name.  I’ve never timed it to see whether the name is accurate, but regardless it’s one of my favorite frostings because it’s so simple and quite delicious – the taste reminds me of marshmallows.  The recipe called for piping caps of frosting on each cupcake, and though I tried several times, I couldn’t achieve the look so I went with my standby, the 1M tip and piped a swirl.  A dusting of cinnamon-sugar is the finishing touch on these fun cupcakes.  They’re a great fall treat!  

Many thanks to Katie for hosting this week.  You can find the recipe for the snickerdoodle cupcakes here.