Whether you’re baking for the biggest get-together of the year or want to make something fun with the kids, there’s never a bad occasion for cupcakes. But the experience gets even better when you know how to make colorful, delicious cupcakes with the perfect taste and texture.
When it comes to baking, practice makes perfect. But that doesn’t mean you need to spend years mastering this baked good. Create light, fluffy cupcakes every time by watching out for these most common mistakes to avoid when baking cupcakes.
Measuring Without Precision
Baking is a science. Sure, there’s creativity involved, but the recipe is there for a reason. When you cook something, you can skip certain ingredients and add or remove parts of the recipe to suit your tastes. But in baking, your ingredients affect more than just flavor; they’re responsible for the chemical reactions that bring your dessert to life.
That’s why you must follow the recipe and measure every ingredient with careful precision. This ensures your cupcakes end up light, moist, and fluffy instead of heavy, dry, and collapsed.
Using Cold Ingredients
Have you ever wondered why a recipe calls for room-temperature eggs and butter? You might think you can save a few minutes by grabbing your ingredients straight from the fridge, but that’s one of the most common mistakes to avoid when baking cupcakes.
Letting your eggs and butter come to room temperature is a crucial step that ensures your ingredients are ready to go. Cold butter is hard to mix, and cold eggs can cause your batter to bake unevenly. Room-temperature butter and eggs blend more easily with the rest of your ingredients, creating a smoother batter and better consistency for your finished cupcakes.
Overbaking Your Cupcakes
Getting the baking time just right is one of the trickiest parts of any baked good. Leaving them in the oven too long will lead to dry cupcakes that no amount of frosting can fix.
Avoid this by using an oven thermometer to make sure you’re baking your cupcakes at the right temperature. You should also err on the side of underbaking your cupcakes. Use a toothpick to test if they’re done a couple of minutes before the timer is up. If the toothpick comes back wet and messy, your cupcakes still need some time.
Finally, when it’s time to pull your cupcakes out, take them out of the pan immediately. This will prevent them from continuing to bake in the hot pan.
Frosting Too Soon
Once your cupcakes are out of the oven, it’s tempting to grab your piping bag and start adding a beautiful layer of frosting right away. After all, decorating cupcakes is the fun part! But it won’t be fun when your frosting melts and turns into a slippery, undefined mess on top of your still-hot cupcakes. Let them cool for a while before you start frosting. Trust us, your patience will pay off when you can decorate your cupcakes with a lot less mess (and a lot less stress!).
Want to make baking cupcakes even easier? Grab a cupcake kit from Damask Cakes. With pre-measured ingredients and an easy-to-follow recipe, our kits make baking the perfect cupcakes a breeze.
