Another Vanilla Contender (or two)

It's probably fair to say that I am not the most diligent blogger (thus far), but unfortunately the damands of work and family have taken precedence. This is not to say that I haven't been cupcaking in the mean time... I just haven't had a spare moment to document the results.

So... what have I been making??? Well the persuit of the ultimate vanilla cupcake has continued. The attempt pictured below was a made using a recipe from the Cake Bible (White Velvet Butter Cake).

(as you can see my oven is not exactly cooking evenly!)

The recipe doesn't use egg yolks (only egg whites), but has loads of butter so it still had a nice richness.

Unfortunately I don't think it's keep ability was quite up to scratch; I thought perhaps it was a tad dry the next day, but the finished product looked pretty cute! The Hungry workmates seems pretty happy with the results though (as were monkey one and monekey two) so it is still a contender!

Right now it's in stiff competition with this little fella (below) which has boiling water and vinegar in the recipe (yep I'm trying all sorts).

It's also an egg white no yolk recipe, which definitely makes for a lighter texture in the finished product, but I felt that it lacked a little in the flavour stakes. (These two cupcakes sparked a very longwinded discussion around taste versus texture on the Flickr website... and the general concensus seems to be add more vanilla/ very good quality vanilla, so I will give it another go tonight).

The best thing about this one was that it lasted for DAYS without loosing any of its moistness so it gets serious bonus points for that... Keep ability definately counts!