Vanilla Can be Awesome, Too!

Yellow Buttermilk Cupcakes

with Fluffy Vanilla Frosting

From Martha Stewart’s Cupcakes

Well I wanted to bake something on my Saturday off this past weekend and a friend had recently requested vanilla cupcakes with vanilla frosting after finding the Guinness Chocolate confections a bit too much for her more delicate palate. So, I began paging through my small supply of cookbooks last Thursday evening and these scrumptiously simple cupcakes caught my eye in Martha Stewart’s Cupcakes. I decided to try them out and I’m pretty sure I’ll be coming back to them again in the future fairly often because they turned out beautifully on the first try! I’m sorry this is a post with almost no photos. I got so absorbed in making them that I forgot to take pictures!

Yellow Buttermilk Cupcakes

3 cups cake flour (not self-rising)

1 ½ cups all-purpose flour

¾ teaspoon baking soda

2 ¼ teaspoons baking powder

1 ½ teaspoons coarse salt (unless you use salted butter)

1 cup plus 2 tablespoons (2 ¼ sticks) butter*

2 ¼ cups sugar

5 large whole eggs plus 3 egg yolks, room temperature

2 cups buttermilk, room temperature

2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract

1.) Preheat oven to 350 degrees F and place liners in cupcake trays. While the original recipe states that it makes 36 cupcakes, I got 40 out of it.

2.) Sift together both flours, baking soda, baking powder, and salt (if you using it).

3.) Use an electric mixer to cream butter and sugar together. The mixture should look fluffy and light.

4.) Add the whole eggs in individually, mixing thoroughly after each addition.

5.) Add the yolks and mix in completely.

6.) Add in the flour mixture in three batches, alternating with the buttermilk (so the order is flour mix then 1 cup buttermilk then flour mix then 1 cup buttermilk then flour mix). Make sure to beat thoroughly after each addition.

7.) Add in the vanilla and mix.

8.) Divide the batter between the cups. I like to use a ¼ cup to measure out the batter into the cups.

9.) Bake, rotating the pans about halfway through. The finished cupcakes spring back when touched and a cake tester (or toothpick) should come out clean.

Fluffy Vanilla Frosting

1½ cups (3 sticks) unsalted butter

1 pound (4 cups) confectioners’ sugar, approximately

½ teaspoon pure vanilla extract

1.) Beat the butter with an electric mixer until creamy and pale in color.

2.) Add the sugar, ½ cup at a time, and beat well after each addition. After every two additions turn the speed up to high and beat for about 10 seconds to help aerate the frosting. I added a little bit extra confectioners’ sugar to firm the frosting up just a pinch; I find this necessary with most recipes during the summer. When complete the frosting will be very fluffy but still firm.

3.) Add the vanilla and mix until the frosting is smooth again. Now decorate away! I used fun gel paste food coloring to dye the frosting and then added sprinkles but it looks lovely in its natural color as well! The frosting generally goes on the cupcakes very smoothly.

Paper Towns by John Green

Paper Towns

John Green

SUMMARY: Quentin Jacobsen has spent the majority of his life in love with the brilliantly mysterious and adventure-addicted girl next door, Margo Roth Speigelman. When Q and Margo were nine, they discovered a dead body together. However, since then their interactions have been limited and vaguely friendly at best. While Margo is well-known and admired for her exploits both small and large at Winter Park High, Q is content with his safe and generally anonymous life of school days spent hanging out near the band room between classes with his closest friends Radar and Ben and weekends spent playing videogames. But Q’s comfortably predictable life is suddenly interrupted when Margo appears outside his window for the first time in about nine years. And what follows is a bizarre and thrilling night that Q hopes will be the beginning of a whole new life in which he becomes Margo’s new partner in her glamorous escapades. But when the sun rises, Margo has disappeared and gone from merely being mysterious to becoming a mystery herself. But when Q explores further, trying to understand their night together, he realizes that Margo is a mystery meant to be solved—by him. As he follows the strange, seemingly disconnected clues from Walt Whitman to abandoned trailers, Q begins to question whether he ever really knew the girl he adored for so long.

ONESMARTCUPCAKE SAYS: John Green strikes again with another smart, funny, and emotionally resonant novel. Before I fully explain why I so thoroughly enjoyed this book, I want to address some critiques of the novel.

In developing this review, I glanced around the online book world to feel out some other reactions to the novel. Paper Towns has been criticized by some readers as being too similar to Green’s earlier novels, especially in terms of characterization. Is it true that Q shares certain qualities of intellectualism and geekiness with Miles and Colin? Yes. Does this nerdy and quirky hero have an intense infatuation with a brilliant but unreachable girl? Yes, he does. However, I argue that despite such similarities, Paper Towns stands out as its own work with its own separate (albeit connected) sets of questions and themes. As in his earlier novels, Green explores the difficulty in truly knowing and understanding another human being. He continues to delve into our constant tendency to perceive others through the window of our own needs, desires, and interests and so creating images of people that usually turn out to be much further from reality than we would like to admit. But while Looking for Alaska dealt with these themes in the larger context of dealing with death and grief and An Abundance of Katherines worked with them in context of the unpredictability of life, Paper Towns examines them head-on, utilizing a detective story format to explore the big mystery of human interaction and relationships.

As usual, Green’s characters are intelligent and quirky and his novel is interwoven with a diversity of seeming unrelated but interesting topics ranging this time from music to cartography to Walt Whitman. The text also manages to capture that strange time at the end of high school when everyone is on the verge of entering a new world and a new life separated from the familiar people and places and when the resulting uncertainty can force unprecedented reactions out of a variety of people.

I really enjoyed the detective story/mystery aspect of this novel. I’m an avid mystery reader and here, Green takes the predictable structure of a traditional detective story and uses it to follow Q’s simultaneous search for Margo and for more honest relationships. I also thoroughly enjoyed the humor embedded into the narrative, especially through Margo’s ingenious plots and Q and his gang’s final, epic road trip. Green also manages to achieve some truly lovely emotional moments between his characters, especially the unsure but determined Q and the fascinating (and somewhat selfish) Margo. Overall, John Green continues to produce witty YA fiction and accordingly my massive literary crush on him continues to grow.

4 ½ / 5 STARS

Going Bovine by Libba Bray

Going Bovine

Libba Bray

SUMMARY: Slacker Cameron simply wants to continue coasting through high school and life. But Cameron’s low-expectation existence is rudely interrupted by some unpleasant news: he has Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, also known as Mad Cow’s disease. So he’s going to die. Soon. Without losing his virginity or even graduating from high school. This, in Cameron’s opinion, sucks. A lot. But just as it seems like he’s going to be spending the rest of his days in the hospital turning into a sponge-brain, Cameron is given a second chance at living by the appearance of Dulcie, a kooky angel in combat boots with a mission for Cameron—a mission that could save both the world and his life. So Cameron sets out on the road trip to end all road trips in the company of a paranoid, video game obsessed dwarf, a Norse god trapped as a garden gnome, and the frustrating but fascinating Dulcie. Along the way Cameron learns to like jazz, gains real friends, falls in love, travels between dimensions, battles a mad scientist, frees the snow globes, saves the world, and finally has sex. For the first time in his life, Cameron is truly alive even as the reality of his own mortality seems to coming ever closer.

ONESMARTCUPCAKE THINKS: This novel had a lot of hype; a multitude of people wrote rave reviews and then there’s that whole Printz Award thing. Also, I had been intrigued by the premise since I first heard about it on http://www.readingrants.org/ a while ago. So I was pretty excited to finally get my hooves on a copy of Going Bovine. Then I actually read it and it more than lived up to the hype. Nothing could have prepared me for how unmistakably brilliant this quirky, hilarious, touching, and wonderful novel is.

Firstly, I fell in love with Cameron, the hilariously honest and charmingly realistic narrator. From the vocabulary to the subject matter, Cameron’s narration reads as though it is straight from the sarcastic mouth of an actual sixteen-year-old boy. I loved Cameron’s frank commentary on his family, his peers, his surroundings, and his unique situation. Moreover, I greatly enjoyed following Cameron’s development over the course of the novel as he discovered that there is so much more to life than mere survival.

Bray also deserves high praise for her ability to adapt the picaresque format and style for a modern American audience. According to the Oxford Concise Dictionary of Literary Terms, a picaresque novel can either be a novel with a picaroon (a rogue or scoundrel) as its protagonist or a narrative composed of a variety of episodes connected primarily through a protagonist who is usually undergoing a journey of some kind. In either case, this type of story is usually episodic and frequently uses first person narration. In Going Bovine, Bray has managed to utilize these structural and stylistic qualities within a new, purely American and modern context. The combination of the iconic American road trip with the traditional journey of classic picaresque is a match made in literary heaven. The physical adventure full of kooky characters and fantastical events echoes the equally compelling journey Cameron is undergoing within himself as he learns to embrace life rather than merely coast through it. The creative use of the famous picaresque novel Don Quixote throughout the narrative adds another layer of complexity and richness to an already fantastic novel. Although I have not yet read the classic Spanish novel (I’m putting on my list!), I know the significant role that questions of reality versus unreality play in the narrative. Cameron, like Don Quixote, is on a quest; but also like Don Quixote, Cameron’s journey and experience seems to be constantly shifting between the real and the unreal or the imagined due to the nature of his disease. However, as in the Spanish novel, reality as traditionally or scientifically defined is insignificant when contrasted to the significant questions posed and answered by the apparently imagined journey. Cameron might actually be lying in his hospital bed being read Don Quixote the entire length of his fantastic road trip but his growth in understanding about friendship, love, sex, mortality, and the human condition could not be more real.

Whew! That got a little philosophical! But then this book made me think just as much as it made me laugh and cry. Combining topics ranging from physics to Norse myth to jazz, Libba Bray crafts a fun and fascinating journey that consistently engages the mind and the heart; because at the center of this novel is the simple story of a boy faced with the universal struggle of learning to live with reality of death.

5/5 STARS

The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary E. Pearson

The Adoration of Jenna Fox

Mary E. Pearson

SUMMARY: A seventeen-year-old girl has just woken up from a yearlong coma, the result of a horrific accident from which she is still recuperating. At least this is what she been told. Jenna Fox woke without remembering her life or her name; there are strange gaps in her vocabulary yet her knowledge of history, literature, and science seems unnaturally detailed. Jenna’s only connection to her mysterious past is the series of home videos recording the first sixteen years of her life that her tense mother and absent father have instructed her to watch. But soon Jenna’s memories begin to resurface and she starts to ask questions no one seems willing to answer. Can she really be the same person as the carefree girl in the videos? What actually happened after the accident? Why will no one speak about the important event itself? What have her parents risked to save their precious child?

ONESMARTCUPCAKE THINKS: I need to make a confession. You know the whole ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’ thing? I totally ignore that rule in many situations. While I will never give up on a book because it has an uninteresting cover, I will consistently at least pick up a book based on my interest in its cover or title. The Adoration of Jenna Fox first caught my eye in this precise fashion. I had seen the title somewhere and then saw the cover and was totally caught by the neat cover art. But it was the addictive mystery that kept me reading once I opened the cover.

I liked The Adoration of Jenna Fox. The suspense and slow revelation of the primary mystery kept me turning the pages. The premise allows Pearson to provoke fascinating and frighteningly current questions about the technological rush to beat death, scientific and medical ethics, and the definitions of humanity. Additionally, I quite like Jenna. Her struggle to understand herself is filled with an earnestness, fear, and uncertainty that would seem familiar to any teenager and anyone who remembers being one; while most seventeen-year-olds’ search for identity takes place in less extreme circumstances, the emotions remain universal.

However, upon completing the novel my final impression was of enjoyment with slight disappointment. The ride had been thrilling but at times, a little hazy. While I found most of the secondary characters interesting, some (such as Dane or even Allys and Ethan) were underdeveloped in comparison with Jenna or her grandmother. Also, there were occasional events or plot points that lacked full explanation or connection to the larger narrative. However, I enjoyed The Adoration of Jenna Fox; it’s a sci-fi thriller with a touch of romance and medical ethics thrown in and the unique combination results in an addictive and thought provoking novel.

3/5 STARS

The First of Many Cupcake Excursions!

Chocolate-Guinness Cupcakes with
Bailey's Buttercream Frosting

This is the second time I’ve made these scrumptious confections and I’ve fallen even more in love with them each time! The recipe is adapted from the brilliant Smitten Kitchen where they are called ‘Chocolate Whiskey and Beer Cupcakes’ and associated with the somewhat infamous cocktail known as an Irish Car Bomb in which one drops a shot of Bailey’s and Irish Whiskey into a pint of Guinness and then drinks the resulting catastrophe before it curdles. However, I have modified them to leave out the whiskey-chocolate filing for two reasons. First, they are quite rich enough unfilled. Second, I am a poor student and didn’t want to spend the extra money on whiskey :) So here goes my first blog-documented kitchen adventure!

Guinness-Chocolate Cupcakes

1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter*
3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder**2 cups all purpose flour
2 cups sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
3/4 teaspoon salt*
2 large eggs
2/3 cup sour cream

1 cup dark stout (such as Guinness)

* I have found that if you can use salted butter and simply leave out the ¾ teaspoon salt just as successfully

** Dutch process is suggested but I have found that Hershey’s Extra Dark is an effective substitute

1.) Preheat oven to 350°F and place cupcake liners in cupcake tins. This recipe makes approximately 24 cupcakes.

2.) Soften up the butter and place it in a large saucepan on medium heat. Once the butter becomes mostly melted, add in the stout. Bring the butter and stout to simmer then add cocoa powder and whisk until smooth. Usually it’s easiest to turn the heat off and lift the saucepan away from the heat while adding the cocoa; this helps stop the mixture from bubbling over too much. Also,
I found a whisk to be the most effective mixing instrument. Once mixed together, set this mixture aside to cool slightly.

3.) Mix flour, sugar, baking soda, and 3 / 4 teaspoon salt (unless you used salted butter then leave the salt out) together in a large bowl until blended.

4.) Using an electric mixer beat the eggs and sour cream together in a second bowl until blended.

5.) Mix flour, sugar, baking soda, and 3 / 4 teaspoon salt (unless you used salted butter then leave the salt out) together in a large bowl until blended.

6.) Using an electric mixer beat the eggs and sour cream together in a second bowl until blended.

7.) Next, pour the stout-cocoa mixture into the egg mixture and beat until combined.

8.) Add the flour mixture into this batter and mix until fully combined.

9.) Pour the batter into the cupcake liners. They should each be filled about 3 / 4 of the way; I like to use a 1 / 4 cup measure to measure out the batter.

10.) Bake until a cake tester (or a toothpick) comes out clean—-usually between 15 and 20 minutes. Then let them cool briefly before popping them out of their ‘cups.’

While the cupcakes are cooling, whip up this yummy frosting!

Bailey’s Buttercream Frosting

3-4 cups confectionary sugar

1 stick (1/2 cup) unsalted butter, softened to room temperature

3-4 tablespoons Bailey’s (can be replaced with milk or heavy cream)

1.) Using an electric mixer of some kind, whip the butter for several minutes until very fluffy.

2.) Slowly, just a few tablespoons at a time, add in the powdered sugar.

3.) Add in the Baileys (or substitute) and whip the frosting until all is combined. Use your personal judgment of taste and texture to decide the exact amounts of sugar and Bailey’s you use.

NOTE: I doubled this recipe when I made mine because I like lots of frosting on my cupcakes for both taste-related and aesthetic reasons!

Decorate away! I used a star tip to make fancy swirly tops on mine but there are many other options for creative decorating!

Looking for Alaska by John Green

Looking for Alaska

John Green

SUMMARY: Miles begins his junior year at Culver Creek hoping that the new school will simultaneously be an escape from his safe life in Florida and his entrance into the mysterious ‘Great Perhaps.’ For the first time, Miles has friends and a real sense of belonging. But it is his intense friendship with the volatile and enigmatic Alaska Young that will change Miles most permanently and catapult him into the frightening world of adulthood.

ONESMARTCUPCAKE THINKS: I was first introduced to John Green a few years ago through his second book, An Abundance of Katherines, which I absolutely loved. So now I’m finally getting a chance to catch up of the rest of this fabulous author’s small but potent collection before he publishes another work of brilliance! My high expectations of this novel, Green’s debut, were not disappointed in the least.

Miles is an excellent protagonist, hitting all the right notes of wit, vulnerability, quirkiness, and humor. His narration ranges from sarcastic to poignant to classic teenage crassness. For me, it was both fun and nostalgic to follow Miles as he adapted to his new life at Culver Creek, joined the pranking and adventuring world of his new friends, and contemplated the large questions of life in his spare time.

The novel is divided into ‘before’ and ‘after’ an event that remains unidentified until its actual occurrence; the mystery maintains an underlying tension throughout the earlier portion of the story and this tension comes to a shocking conclusion three quarters of the way through the novel. Simultaneously, this book shows the particular quirky sense of humor that I so enjoyed in An Abundance of Katherines. This quality appears in variety of unique details: Miles’s obsession with famous people’s last words, the bizarre nicknames, and the ingeniously complex pranks.

But most potently, Looking for Alaska honestly attempts to express and illustrate the raw pain and confusion of grief. Miles’ individual and shared struggles to make sense of death are incredibly touching and realistic in its combination of guilt, anger, frustration, and numbness. This novel beautifully deals with such a somber topic while producing a satisfying and even uplifting conclusion. When Looking for Alaska was published about 5 years ago, it gained a slew of honors and recognitions, including the 2006 Printz Award, and it deserves all of them.

4 1/2 / 5 STARS

The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt

The Children’s Book

A.S. Byatt

SUMMARY: Spanning the Victorian era through World War I, this novel follows a large interconnected cast of characters through the tumult of the large-scale cultural, political, and social changes sweeping Britain and the world. The novel begins with Olive Wellwood, a famous children’s book author, and her oldest son’s meeting with an artistically talented runaway in the corridors underneath the South Kensington museum later known as the Victoria and Albert Museum. The reader follows the young man back to the Wellwood home where both become immersed in the passionate world of the unconventional family and its equally unusual network of friends.

ONESMARTCUPCAKE THINKS: I was very excited about this book; I am a big fan of Byatt in general and her earlier novel Possession is one of my favorite novels of all time. My expectations were generally not disappointed; I really enjoyed this book. It is a great but occasionally flawed novel.

As with her other works, Byatt immerses the reader in the time period and culture in which the narrative is set through the use of intricate and beautifully drawn details. Here, the amount of information packed into the narrative can be overpowering or distracting. As a history buff and a person particularly in love with 19th century Britain, I very much enjoyed her historical detail and didn’t mind the occasional interludes of pure socio-political background information too much. However, some readers might find such passage uninteresting; even I prefer the history to be incorporated into the plot and character development.

I continue to admire and enjoy the intimate portrayals of individual characters Byatt achieves, especially in this novel, which contains at least 10 to 20 characters of some significance. She manages to juggle the multiple storylines and characters quite well generally but the sheer numbers can become overwhelming at times. Certain characters disappear and reappear from the narrative and for the first few chapters I had a little difficulty keeping track of them. Certain characters remain underdeveloped in comparison to others—an almost inevitable result of a narrative following so many characters over such a lengthy period of time.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book. Byatt impeccably crafts a detailed and fascinating world for the reader to become completely engrossed in. For such a long and in-depth novel, The Children’s Book hits some beautiful emotional notes. The final sections dealing with WWI are especially poignant and the portions describing the young women’s, especially Dorothy’s, struggle to find a life that balances intellectual fulfillment and the world’s expectations. I was also completely fascinated by the novel’s exploration of the side roads of history; Byatt delves into puppetry, theatre, the women’s suffrage movement, children’s literature, women in medicine, and women’s education. I found myself reading this novel into wee hours of the morning and for me, that is one of the key signs of a good book.

4/5 STARS