Wholewheat Cupcakes
Hooray…”handfulofrecipes” is two months old now! Can you believe it? We just can’t thank each and everyone of you enough for all your encouragement and support. The journey so far has been truly amazing. To celebrate, we would love to share these cupcakes with you. Quite a simple and undemanding recipe, using wholewheat flour and sucanat yet giving excellent result. Hope you would enjoy!
But before getting into making these cupcakes, I must tell you, if it was not for the first paragraph of chapter 7, “Creative Confidence” by Tom Kelley & David Kelley, “So why not set this book aside right this minute and run out to try putting one of your favorite ideas into action? Go ahead. We’ll wait right here…”, handfulofrecipes.com would be still be remaining as a dream in our minds. Every single word in this book has been so inspiring but for me the real breakthrough came from:
“To ultimately reach a creative breakthrough, you just need to start, regardless of small failures that may occur along the way. It’s unlikely that your first try at anything will be a success. But that’s okay. It’s hard to be best right away, so commit to rapid and continuous improvements. The messiness of such trial and error may seem uncomfortable at first, but action allows most of us to learn at a faster rate; it’s almost a prerequisite for success. Otherwise, the desire to be best can get in the way of getting better.
This lesson was brought to life for us in a story from the insightful book Art & Fear. A clever ceramics instructor divided his pottery class into two groups during the first session. One half of the students, he announced, would be graded on quality as represented by a single ceramic piece due at the end of the class, a culmination of all they had learned. The other half of the class he would grade based on quantity. For example, fifty pounds of finished work would earn them an A. Throughout the course, the “quality” students funneled their energy into meticulously crafting the perfect ceramic piece, while the “quantity” students threw their pots nonstop in every session. And although it was counterintuitive to his students, you can guess how his experiment came out:at the end of the course, the best pieces all came from students whose goal was quantity, the ones who spent most time actually practicing their craft.”
This truly was a life changing experience for me, who was not happy with the quality and thus did not ‘DO’. When I reached the above mentioned lines of chapter seven, I actually put the book down, worked on the blog, the name of which was registered almost three years ago, and it went “LIVE” the same day. How can I ever thank them enough?
Okay… now let’s DO it.
Wholewheat Cupcakes
(makes 8 regular cupcakes)
100 gms wholewheat flour
3/4 tsp baking powder
100 gms butter , room temperature
1 tsp vanilla extract
100 gms sucanat, powdered fine in a mixer
2 eggs
Preheat the oven to 350F. Line a muffin tin with paper liners.
Sift the wholewheat flour and baking powder into a bowl.
In a large bowl beat or whisk the butter and finely powdered sucanat until light and fluffy. Add the eggs and beat well. Add vanilla extract and the sifted ingredients. Beat until it is smooth, about 5 minutes. Stop once in the middle of this and scrape the sides down using a spatula. The longer mixing time enables air to get into the mixture, which will make it lighter. Divide the mixture between cupcake liners, half-filling them.
Bake them for about 25 minutes or until golden brown. Just to make sure they don’t get over baked, insert a toothpick at 20 minutes and check and adjust the baking time. Cool on a wire rack for 30 minutes before decorating them.
Sucanat buttercream frosting
50 gms butter, softened
100 gms sucanat, finely powdered in a mixer
1-2 tbsp hot water
Beat the butter until light, add the powdered sucanat and beat again, adding enough water to make a lighter consistency. Frost the cupcakes and enjoy.
