A Childhood Favorite

One of my favorite childhood memories comes from when I was about 7 or 8 years old.  My mom dropped my younger sister and I off at our school's fun fair for a couple hours (how times have changed since then) and the first game we stopped at was a cake walk.  Basically, it was like musical chairs, but standing up on a big game board.  When the music stopped, if you were standing on the spot the caller picked, then you would win one of these homemade cakes.  Well, as luck would have it, I won!  A 13x9  yellow cake iced with chocolatey goodness, complete with rainbow non-pariel sprinkles.  No doubt it came from a box and the icing from a store bought tub, but to my 8 year old self I had hit the jackpot!  I remember proudly carrying the cake around from game to game and savoring every morsel when we finally got to dig in to it....

Anyhow, I digress.  The reason I took a walk down memory lane was to introduce one of my favorite cupcake/frosting combinations, my childhood favorite reincarnated and a classic, for sure, the vanilla cupcake topped with chocolate icing and non-pariel sprinkles...

It was one of my girlfriend's birthday last week so I whipped up some of these for her birthday brunch.  (See my previous post for the recipes.)

Everything looks so much prettier with ribbon. :-)

I recently read a neat tip on CakeJournal.com about how to get a vanilla cupcake to have a nice dome.  (Btw, if you haven't checked out this blog you must, it is filled with great tutorials and tips!)  For me, my chocolate cupcakes always rise beautifully but my vanilla cupcakes always seem to spill over and have the dreaded flat "muffin top".  Anyhow, the suggestion was instead of mixing the room temperature butter with sugar in the beginning, mix the sugar with eggs first and then add melted butter to the milk.  I tried this tip to make these cupcakes and they did indeed give the cupcakes a beautiful dome.  However, I found that it changed the consistency of the cupcake a bit (the texture was bit spongy?). 

Anyone have any foolproof tips on getting a beautiful cupcake dome?