Wine Wednesday: Fancy Cupcake Edition

Last week, Mr. RH was fairly insistent that the only cupcakes worth eating were lemon-raspberry cupcakes.  Apparently MY favorite, white on white cupcakes, are not delicious enough.  Clearly he's mentally ill.

Anyways, it stuck in my head long enough that I knew I had to at least give them a try.  But I was scared, because stuffing a raspberry inside of a cupcake seems like quite the task. 

So, I googled around and found no satisfactory recipes... so I decided to wing it.

I baked a box of white cupcakes, easy peasy.

Then came the task of making the raspberry "sauce" for the inside of the cupcake.  I saw several variations of this stuffing, but they all seemed a little weird.

Basically, I heated the raspberries and maybe 3 tablespoons of white sugar on the stove.  My raspberries were pretty fresh so they didn't want to mush up.... so I used a potato masher on them.  Problem solved.

 

Eventually, they bubbled up and got all gooey and perfect.  I added a little bit (less than a teaspoon) of cornstarch to a little water and threw that into the mix to ensure it wouldn't be too runny and ruin my cupcakes.

 Next up was cutting a little reservoir in the center of the cupcakes.  I used my smallest paring knife and just dug a little cone out of each cupcake.  I realized halfway through that I was digging too deep and started to make them shallower.  You want to make sure your filling has some cupcake to soak into without breaking open.  

I had seen several people fill their cupcakes using a pastry bag, but I really thought that would leave too much raspberry goo in each cupcake.  Plus, I didn't know if my raspberry mix was thin enough for even a hefty pastry bag.

Enter... my oldest and cheapest teaspoon.  I just scooped a little bit into the spoon and pushed it into the cupcake.  I also tried to push the raspberry up around the edge of my little reservoir, again so it wouldn't soak through the bottom of the cake.

After this step, I deserved the wine.  As I told (whined to) Mr. RH, this stuffed cupcake business is hard!  And by hard I mean slightly more labor intensive than a regular cupcake.  I just wanted to put my feet up and watch Real Housewives, is that so much to ask?!

 

 The frosting is actually my favorite kind of frosting - a instant lemon pudding mixed with 1 cup cold milk, .25 cups powdered sugar, and a small tub of cool whip.  It's just THE perfect frosting - and you can use any flavor of pudding mix for variety.  Even though vanilla is obviously the best.

 

I actually managed to hold off eating one until this morning.  I don't even know who I am anymore.

I have to say, it was worth the wait.  And the wine.

Happy Wine Wednesday!  What are YOU drinking?