Attributes of the perfect cupcake
It’s midnight and you have the snacks. What do you do for a living? There’s a box of cold pizza from two nights ago and a few pieces of sushi left over, but your taste buds are craving something different, something sweeter, a delicious bite that melts in your mouth perfectly. A commercial flashes on the television; It’s that trusty Pillsbury dough mixer busy whipping up rich, creamy cupcake batter! Eureka!
Essentially, you know you could easily drive to the nearest grocery store and pick up a box full of factory-made cupcakes, but you’re no novice. When you decide to indulge, there’s no way you’re going to do it halfway. And you have the perfect cupcake in mind; now no qualified second try will satisfy your new craving.
The perfect cupcake… in your mind you visualize it. It’s moist, fresh out of the oven and fills the air with heavenly aromas that one can’t help but subdue as well. It’s your favorite flavor, whether it’s vanilla, white, chocolate, or another tempting cake base. It is decorated with your favorite ingredients: flavored glaze, sprinkles; the jobs.
It peels easily from the wrapper, but leaves a light coating of cupcake scraps that can be licked off later. The glaze is applied generously. Cover the entire top of the cupcake a few times. The glaze is sweet, but light. It’s a decoration, but it also adds to the overall quality of the cupcake. It is not hardened or lumpy. It is smooth, sweet and easy to lick or eat with the cupcake. Sparkles of light also delicately adorn it. Giving it a simply crunchy sweet texture, one that perfectly offsets the soft batter of the treat’s pie crust.
As you bite into the cupcake, it doesn’t fall apart, but stays together firmly. It’s not as hard as a chocolate bar, but not as light as a piece of angel food cake. Its perfect consistency falls somewhere in between the two, thick enough that each bite can be significantly savored. Because it’s moist, each bite easily melts in your mouth and leaves a slight stickiness on your fingers. It’s rich, but not overwhelmingly. It’s best with a tall glass of milk, maybe two, to accentuate the decadence of its flavor.
On some days, the perfect cupcake is described above. On other days, when one is starving and wants a quick snack to gobble down, the two-day cupcake, for some unusual reason, hits the spot. It has sat on the countertop long enough to harden a bit more, giving it a more substantial feel. Biting into it feels more like biting into a nice piece of bread. The frosting gives you the feeling that you’re biting into something similar to a candy bar because it’s had time to harden a bit, giving the cupcake another added dessert quality. It becomes more of a confection than a baked good, giving rise to the pleasing flexibility its ever-changing texture can take on, making it yet another variation on the perfect cupcake.