Meyer Lemon Cupcakes and Thanksgiving

If you have ever seen Meyer lemons in a store, please let me know.

Meyer lemons are one of those things that Martha Stewart likes to use in her recipes to make life difficult for people who don't have Meyer lemon trees. Meyer lemons are, in fact, different from regular, run-of-the-mill grocery store lemons. They are smoother, and have a milder taste, more similar to an orange.

In San Francisco, we had a Meyer lemon cupcake at Kara's Cupcakes in Ghirardelli Square. Two days later, my parents went back and bought another one. It was that good.

I decided the recipe I would make over Thanksgiving had to be the Meyer lemon one. I called my mom to see if she could find Meyer lemons in a store in Las Vegas, and she informed me that their neighbors had a Meyer lemon tree, and they had been passing them out at church. My mom managed to score eight of them in exchange for a few cupcakes and the recipe. And we were on our way.

The cupcakes were a very small part of the weekend, truth be told.

I got to eat at In-N-Out Burger, one of my favorite places to eat when I am in Vegas, on Wednesday night, with my parents and Melanee's family. The burger was excellent, but the best part of dinner was hanging out with Kevin while he drank catsup and Sammie, who had a really tough time understanding why it wasn't okay for her to eat food that has fallen on the floor.

You may notice Kevin's catsup moustache. Up until this happened, he and Melanee were sharing a catsup cup. After that, Mel got her own.

We made a quick stop at a cupcake bakery. One of my other goals for this trip was to sample as many cupcakes as I could get my hands on. My first stop was a place called Cupcake Lane Bakery, whose cupcakes were all named after streets.

This is their pretty packaging.

This is what was left of a Savannah Street, which was red velvet with cream cheese frosting. We also got a Lombard Street (chocolate filled with cream, like a Hostess Cupcake), a Road to Hana (chocolate with a liquid chocolate center and chocolate buttercream), and a Michigan Avenue, which was lemon with lemon buttercream. The Savannah Street was great, but the others were just average.

After I took these pictures, I misplaced my camera for several days. On Thursday, we had Thanksgiving dinner. In the evening, we made ornaments out of Sculpey, which we used to decorate a tree to send to my brother Danny on his mission. It started out with simple ornaments made with cookie cutters, and slowly progressed to some pretty ornate ornaments. Shane surprised us all with his creativity.

Friday morning, Melanee, Dad, and I woke up early and braved the Black Friday crowd at Wal-Mart. For those of you who have never experienced Black Friday, it is one of those things that is worth experiencing once, if only because it makes you appreciate Wal-Mart on days when it is not Black Friday. However, we had a checklist of things to get, and we managed to get all of them. When we got home, I fell asleep for several hours. In the afternoon, we visited the Bass Pro Shop located in the Silverton Casino. The kids got a chance to sit on Santa's lap, which only Sammie was okay with. We have some great shots of Kevin crying hysterically while Sammie gives the camera her best smile.

They also had a giant fish tank, and some unlucky employees who put on mermaid costumes and periodically swim around for the tourists.

When we got home, the Oka family, who, collectively was running on about 20 minutes of sleep, crashed, and we didn't see any of them until the next morning. Meanwhile, the rest of the adults watched Angels and Demons while I started the Meyer lemon cupcakes.

These cupcakes do not have frosting, but they do have Meyer lemon curd, which has sort of a pudding-like consistency and a dusting of powdered sugar. The cake is a little bit dense, and the cream cheese gives it a sort of a cheesecake taste. My family had no trouble eating them, despite the fact that we had lots of food around the house even before I made them.

Meyer Lemon Cupcakes (makes 42)

3 1/2 c. all purpose flour, sifted

2 Tbsp. finely grated Meyer lemon zest, plus 2 Tbsp. fresh Meyer lemon juice (about 1 to 2 Meyer lemons)

1/2 tsp. baking powder

1 1/2 tsp. coarse salt (I use sea salt)

1 3/4 c. (3 1/2 sticks) unsalted butter (I did not use unsalted butter because, apparently, there was a run on it at the nearby grocery store)

3 c. granulated sugar

8 oz. cream cheese, room temperature

7 large eggs (No, that is not a typo. Brace yourself, it gets worse.)

1 tsp. pure vanilla extract

Confectioner's sugar, for dusting

Preheat oven to 325. Line your muffin tins. Whisk together dry ingredients. Cream butter and sugar until pale and fluffy. Beat in cream cheese. Add eggs, one at a time, beating until each is incorporated, scraping down sides of bowl as needed. Beat in lemon juice and vanilla. Add flour mixture. Divide batter, filling each muffin cup 3/4 of the way. Bake until a tester comes out clean, about 28 minutes.

Let cupcakes cool completely. To finish, dust with confectioner's sugar. Fill a pastry bag fitted with a coupler and a medium round tip with lemon curd. Insert tip into top of each cupcake and squeeze some curd into a pool on top (it will look kind of like a fried egg). Or, if you left your pastry tips and bags at home, you can cut a little out of the center of each cupcake (someone will eat the centers, I promise), put your lemon curd in a Ziploc bag, cut the tip of, and squeeze it into the craters you made in the cupcakes.

Lemon Curd

2 whole eggs, plus 8 egg yolks (no, this is not a typo, either)

1 c. sugar

2/3 c. fresh lemon juice (about 6 lemons)

2 Tbsp. unsalted butter, cut into small pieces, room temperature

Combine whole eggs and yolks, sugar, and lemon juice into a heatproof bowl set over a pan of simmering water. Cook, whisking constantly until mixture is thick enough to coat the back of a spoon. Remove from heat. Add butter, a few pieces at a time. whisking until smooth after each addition. Strain through a fine sieve into another bowl and cover with parchment paper or plastic wrap, pressing it directly on surface. This prevents the curd from getting a skin, unless you are a fan of pudding skin.

This recipe makes a lot, as you can see, so it is a good one to take to a potluck dinner or to distribute among your family, friends and neighbors.

I imagine you can make these with regular lemons, and I would guess it's not that different. It's a great recipe.

I continued on with my cupcake crawl on Monday.

I made a trip to Mad Hatter cupcakes, across the street from Cupcake Lane. We got a chocolate cupcake with peanut butter frosting, and a Mad About Coconut cupcake, which was coconut cake with coconut filling and coconut frosting. That one was my mom's favorite. We ate them for dessert at Baja Fresh.

And the last cupcake store I visited on my trip was the Cupcakery. This was clearly the most chain-like store I visited, although, when I looked it up online, I discovered that they had only four locations-two in Las Vegas, and two in the Dallas area. Weird. We had a buy-2-get-one-free coupon, and we bought a chocolate mint cupcake, a Boston creme pie, and a maple pecan cupcake.

It was a great Thanksgiving.

Candied Sweet Potato Cupcakes

This was a weird recipe for me to make for this reason:

I never eat sweet potatoes at Thanksgiving. Since childhood, I have felt that they were one part of the meal I could do without. I do not understand why you would take a vegetable and bake it with brown sugar and marshmallows. I think, in particular, the texture of it bothers me. However, given that I do not mind baking vegetables into cupcakes (zucchini, carrots, pumpkin), I had no serious objection to the cupcakes, even though they did call for candied pecans and marshmallows.

Side note: What is a vegetable? One of Layne's lesser-known rants is about this very subject. If you think about it, all vegetables can be classified as something else. For example, I believe a sweet potato falls into the category of tuber. I have just looked it up, and according to Wikipedia, vegetable is an informal classification based mostly on culinary tradition, meaning that something is classified as a vegetable if you cook it like a vegetable, whereas fruit has an actual specific botanical meaning. Don't we all feel smarter now?

Anyway, these turned out to be really good. You will notice that there are browned marshmallows on the tops of these. Sadly, I have had trouble with my kitchen torch since I went a little crazy with it when I first got it, so I used the broiler to brown my marshmallows.

You may wonder why I did not move the candy cane Oreos before I took this picture. I have no explanation for that.

You may also notice that I am now using some fancy stackable cooling racks. When I posted about not having any, Melanee made fun of me, so I bought some. It turns out that it is very nice to have racks to cool cupcakes on.

I made these for a pre-Thanksgiving work party. They seemed to go over pretty well.

Candied Sweet Potato Cupcakes

Makes 24

2 pounds (about 3 medium) sweet potatoes, scrubbed

2 c. all-purpose flour

2 tsp. baking powder

1 tsp. coarse salt

2 tsp. ground cinnamon

1/2 tsp. nutmeg

2 sticks unsalted butter, room temperature

1 c. granulated sugar

1 c. packed dark-brown sugar

4 large eggs, room temperature

2 tsp. pure vanilla extract

For topping:

2 c. miniature marshmallows

candied pecan pieces

Preheat oven to 400. Pierce sweet potatoes with a fork and place on a baking sheet. I lined mine with aluminum foil. Bake until completely soft and juices begin to seep from potatoes and caramelize (about 1 hour). Remove from oven. Reduce temperature to 325.

When cool enough to handle, slice potatoes in half lengthwise and use a fork to scrape the flesh from the skin into a bowl, discarding skins. Mash potato with fork until smooth (there should be about 2 c.)

Line muffin tins. Whisk together dry ingredients, including spices. Cream butter and sugars until pale and fluffy. Add eggs, one at a time, beating until each is incorporated, scraping down sides of bowl as needed. Add flour mixture in three batches.

Divide batter evenly among cups. Bake about 28 minutes.

To make the topping, Martha suggests dividing the marshmallows into 24 piles, placing the piles on a baking sheet, heating them under the broiler, and transferring them to the cupcakes.

The marshmallows proved to be too sticky for that to work. Instead, I piled them on the cupcakes first, and then put them under the broiler. Then, I added candied pecan pieces on top.

To candy the pecans, heat 1/2 c. sugar and 1/4 c. water to a simmer, stirring occasionally until the sugar is dissolved. Stop stirring. Cook until syrup comes to a boil, washing down sides of the pan with a pastry brush to prevent crystals from forming. Boil until mixture turns a light amber. Remove from heat. Stir in pecans with a wooden spoon to coat completely. Remove pecans from caramel. Spread in a single layer on a baking sheet lined with foil. Let cool completely before using or storing. Break into small pieces if necessary.

Pumpkin Cupcakes with Brown Butter Frosting

In case you still have a hankering to make pumpkin cupcakes, I made another recipe. I don't know why Martha has two pumpkin recipes. Presumably, she has a lot of pumpkins in her pumpkin patch, which she harvests and cooks down and needs to use for something.

I have never been a big fan of pumpkin pie. While discussing Thanksgiving dinner with Melanee and George--in particular, pie--I learned that pumpkin pie is our least favorite of all pies. I love pumpkin bread, pumpkin bars, and pumpkin chocolate chip cookies, but I have never been a big fan of the custardy texture of pumpkin pie. I do not need it to feel like my Thanksgiving dinner has been a success. This recipe is not like pumpkin pie, just to put your mind at ease, if you, like me, do not like pumpkin pie.

This recipe is a bit more rustic than the last recipe. It calls for browned butter, which was something I had never made before.

These cupcakes are amazingly soft, and the brown butter gives them a kind of caramel flavor. It's a little different from the other pumpkin cupcake recipe, but equally delicious. Weeks later, one of the women I worked with said she continues to have dreams about the brown butter frosting.

Pumpkin-Brown Butter Cupcakes

1 1/2 sticks unsalted butter, room temperature, plus more for tins.

1 2/3 c. all-purpose flour, plus more for tins.

1/4 c. fresh sage leaves, cut into chiffonade (optional)

2 tsp. baking powder

1 tsp. salt

1/2 tsp. ground cinnamon

1/4 tsp. freshly grated nutmeg

1/8 tsp. ground cloves

1 c. canned pumpkin puree (not pie filling)

1 c. packed light brown sugar

1/2 c. granulated sugar

2 large eggs

Preheat oven to 325. Brush muffin tins with butter, dust with flour, tapping out excess. In a saucepan, melt butter over medium-low heat. Add sage, if desired, and continue to cook, swirling occasionally, until butter turns golden brown. Skim foam from top, and remove from heat. Pour into a bowl to stop the cooking, leaving behind any burned sediment behind; let cool.

Whisk together dry ingredients. In another bowl, whisk together pumpkin puree, both sugars, eggs, and brown-butter. Add flour mixture, and whisk until just combined.

Divide batter evenly among lined cups, filling each three-quarters full. Bake about 20 minutes. To finish, dip top of each cupcake in brown-butter icing, then turn over quickly and let set.

Brown Butter Icing

(makes 1 cup)

1 stick unsalted butter

2 c. sifted confectioners' sugar

2 tsp. pure vanilla extract

2 tbsp. milk, plus more if needed

Melt butter in a small saucepan over medium heat, swirling pan occasionally, until nut-brown in color, about 10 minutes. Remove from heat, and pour butter into a bowl, leaving any burned sediment behind.

Add confectioners' sugar, vanilla, and 2 tablespoons milk to brown butter; stir until smooth. If necessary, add more milk, a little at a time, just until icing is spreadable. Use immediately.

Pumpkin Patch Cupcakes and San Francisco

I think I need a new strategy with this blog. I feel like the five of you who read/follow my blog need to know that I am still baking the cupcakes. In fact, I have made a lot of cupcakes over the last few weeks. However, after baking them, decorating them, and giving them away, I seem to lack the energy/motivation to blog about them. But I don't want you to give up on me, so I am going to post this one about my most recent cupcakes/adventures in San Francisco and work my way backward. Stay tuned.

A few months ago, in an effort to connect to my Japanese American heritage, I decided to attend the National Council on Family Relations annual conference in San Francisco. Before the conference started, they had an event in which they screened a documentary called Children of the Camps, and toured Japantown, which is the Japanese district of San Francisco. The documentary features six people who were interred as children during World War II, who come together at a retreat to process their experiences related to the camps and the war.

When I told my mom I was going to San Francisco, she immediately wanted to go with me. It turns out, if you are fortunate enough to live in Las Vegas, you can fly to San Francisco and back for less than $100. If you live in Lubbock, it can cost you four times as much. When my parents decided to come along, I suggested my dad attend the pre-conference event with me. He thought it was a great idea.

The documentary was awesome. I now own a copy of it on DVD, if you would ever like to borrow it. It stimulated a lot of good conversation between me and my dad on the bus ride to downtown San Francisco where we first stopped to have lunch. We were offered 12 choices of lunch combos or bento, and were limited to chicken, beef, pork, ramen, or tempura, with a side dish of unagi or sashimi. That's right: Dad had to explain to miscellaneous family scientists from across the country that, with their lunch of chicken, they could choose between barbecued eel or an array of raw fish slabs.

Here I am outside the restaurant, posing next to the plastic food display.

After lunch, we were taken on a tour by a representative from the Japanese American Historical Society. Here she is in front of a monument to three generations of Japanese Americans.

One side represents issei, or the first generation, which would have been my great-grandparents. They were shown as immigrants settling in San Francisco. Another side showed nisei, which would have been my grandparents, and were represented by people in internment camps. Our tour guide, whose name I have already forgotten, is standing in front of the side representing sansei and beyond, meaning my dad's generation, my generation, and future generations. Interestingly, it is this panel that depicts people dressed in Japanese-style clothing, participating in obon. Apparently, in the 1980's, there was a cultural emphasis on reconnecting with one's roots, inspired, in part, by the book/miniseries Roots. Buildings in Japantown that reflect Japanese architecture were built during this period.

Here is a shot of my dad in front of the Peace Pagoda. It was given to San Francisco by the people of Osaka, Japan.

After the tour, we spent some time shopping. We hit the 100-yen store, where I bought a tie for Danny that appears to be a collection of letters that almost spell English words, but not quite. If I were to compare it to my other experiences of shopping for Japanese stuff, I would have to say that Japantown in San Francisco is better than Little Tokyo in LA, but still not very much like actual Japan.

The next day, we took the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) to San Francisco, where we took a cable car down to Fisherman's Wharf. Here are some helpful things we learned about travelling in San Francisco:

• Public transportation is expensive.
• Cable cars are not efficient.

We had clam chowder in sourdough bread bowls and fish 'n chips at a little stand, which we ate while standing up against a counter behind the stand.

Here is a shot of my parents near the beach. It was a pretty chilly day, and we saw no reason to get any closer to the water than that.

We did some shopping in Ghirardelli Square, which is named after the chocolate. However, we did not buy any chocolate. Instead, we bought a cupcake.

Here is a picture of the pretty box it came in.

It was Meyer lemon, which I have a recipe for in my Martha cookbook. It was beautiful and tasted great. In true Mom fashion, she had me go back into the store and buy a second cupcake. It was coconut, and it was also fantastic.

We took a walk along one of the piers and watched people poaching for crabs.

Then we took a cable car back toward the city, where we explored Bloomingdale's and saw Wicked. It was a great day!

The next day, we took a trip up the coast, shopped around in a little resort town called Half Moon Bay, and had some great seafood at a place called Sam's Chowder House. I bought another cupcake, but it was not as good. I have no pictures from my camera on this day, so I will have to get the ones my parents took.

I headed back to Lubbock and life on Friday, and on Saturday night, I made pumpkin patch cupcakes.

Because Martha is Martha, she couldn't possibly include a recipe for just plain pumpkin cupcakes. She had to add some degree of difficulty, so this recipe called for marzipan pumpkins. Marzipan is a sweet paste made out of almonds. It is malleable like fondant, and, according to Lorelei Gilmore, "it is a unique substance unto itself, like Velveeta or plutonium."

Here is my attempt at marzipan pumpkins. I dyed the marzipan orange with gel food color, and shaped it with my fingers. After I made about 16 of them, I sort of lost interest. I do not feel they added much to the overall taste of the cupcakes, and I didn't feel anyone at my ward Mix and Munch would miss not having them.

In all other aspects, they are just regular pumpkin cupcakes.

The recipe calls for cake flour, so they are very light and moist. They are perfect with cream cheese frosting.

They also have only brown sugar in them, which also makes them seem very rustic and fall-like.

Here they are, with and without the marizpan. What do you think, do they add to the cupcakes, or are they just unnecessary fluff?

Marble Cupcakes

The marble cupcakes were not the focus of my week this week. You see, I got to go to a wedding in San Antonio. Here is a shot of me with the bride, my friend Erin. The height difference makes for kind of an awkward picture. I'm pretty sure my head is not actually resting on her chest, but it was pretty late by the time that picture was taken, so, who knows.

When I started my doctoral program two plus years ago, there were four other students who started with me. Three of them were guys-all married, and the other one was a girl who was single like me. She met the man she would later marry toward the end of our first semester, after a comical series of bad dates, and knew, within a few weeks, that he was the man she wanted to spend the rest of her life with. I, on the other hand, have only a comical series of bad dates to show for the last two years, and about 20 cupcake recipes. But, as I have stated before, I am trying not to make this about my love life.

Anyway, Erin got married this weekend in San Antonio, and Kim, Martha, and I decided to go to it. We were all excited to be there to support Erin, and were looking for any excuse to leave Lubbock. Some of the highlights of the weekend included:

• A stop in Brady, TX on our way to San Antonio. Brady, by its own estimation, is considered the heart of Texas. However, the main drag of Brady consisted of two sketchy gas stations, a gym, and some sort of real estate/taxidermy hybrid business.
• The hotel fire alarm going off at 7:00 in the morning. The night before, Kim, while studying a map of our floor on the back of the hotel room door, commented on the instructions underneath, which said, "Should a fire break out, do NOT stay in your hotel room." Her comment was that anyone who needed to be told to leave a burning room may have deeper issues. She apologized profusely as we descended 11 flights of stairs and stood outside for less than ten minutes before they let us back in. On the plus side, since we were already downstairs, we decided to have breakfast, which included self-made Belgian waffles.
• Lots of college football. Our hotel room had two TV's, which meant we could watch two games at once. We watched Iowa vs. Northwestern and Texas vs. Central Florida in the morning, and Navy vs. Notre Dame in the afternoon while we got ready. We had a real struggle to tear ourselves away from the two TVs in the country club where they were married that were showing the last few minutes of the Oregon/Stanford game and the Alabama/LSU game so that we could be seated outside for the wedding. I think we all appreciated that a group of three women could enjoy so much college football.

It was a very nice wedding. Erin's family is some sort of Protestant religion, but her husband's family is Jewish, so the ceremony was a blending of several religious traditions, with their own flair added here and there.

Case in point, this was the mariachi band that played outside the ballroom before the reception started.

Here is a shot of Martha, me, Kim, Shannon, and Amber before the reception started. The wait staff was already serving margaritas and appetizers before the reception even got underway. The food was fabulous. The band was amazing! Their lead singer was a tiny, middle-aged white man who did everything from Outkast and Justin Timberlake to Journey and the B-52's, along with a lot of standards.

But, really, the highlight of my weekend was hanging out with Kim and Martha. We are all very busy people, and it was quite a luxury to get to spend three days together watching football and hunting for Snuggies. And they were nice enough to get me home in time to teach Relief Society on Sunday afternoon, which was where I served the marble cupcakes that were supposed to be the subject of this post.

Ironically, I did not take any pictures of these cupcakes. I made them before I left town, and froze them in anticipation of serving them to the girls in my Relief Society class on Sunday.

This is a good recipe. The marbling of the cake makes it not too rich.

Marble Cupcakes

1 3/4 c. cake flour, sifted

2 tsp. baking powder

1/2 tsp. salt

1/3 c. milk, room temperature

1/2 c. (1 stick) unsalted butter, room temperature

1 c. granulated sugar

3 large eggs, room temperature

1 tsp. pure vanilla extract

1/3 c. unsweetened Special Dark cocoa powder

1/4 c. boiling water

Confectioner's sugar, for dusting

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line standard muffin tins with paper liners. Sift together cake flour, baking powder, and salt. Combine milk and cream.

With an electric mixer on medium-high speed, cream butter and granulated sugar until pale and fluffy. Add eggs, one at a time, beating until each is incorporated, scraping down sides of bowl as needed. Beat in vanilla. Add flour mixture in three batches, alternating with two additions of milk mixture, and beating until combined.

To make chocolate batter, measure out 1 c. batter, and transfer to another bowl. Combine cocoa and the boiling water in a bowl. Stir into reserved 1 cup batter.

Fill prepared cups with alternating spoonfuls of vanilla and chocolate batter, filling each three-quarters full (I used a small cookie scoop, and did 2 vanilla and 1 chocolate for each cupcake). Run the tip of a paring knife or wooden skewer through batter in a figure eight motion to make swirls (I used a chopstick). Bake about 20 minutes.

To finish, dust with confectioners' sugar just before serving.

Unless you are running behind and can't remember where you put the confectioners' sugar you stored in your car three days earlier, and then you can serve them without.

Streusel Cupcakes

You never know how much you miss someone until they're gone.

Stephanie went to Scandanavia for ten days in celebration of an important milestone birthday. I missed her. I spent a lot of time in my apartment staring at my laundry.

In an effort to convey to her how much I missed her, and to wish her a happy birthday, I made some cupcakes. My life is turning into that Jack Handey fuzzy memory that goes something like this: "My grandpa used to measure things in terms of cows. If you asked him how big something was, he'd say, 'it's about the size of a small cow.' Or if you asked him how long something would take, he'd say, 'about as long as it would take a cow to drive over here.'" I guess what I'm saying is that I'm finding that the answer to every question in my life or the life of anyone else I know is cupcakes. Sometimes it really works. Other times...

Streusel cupcakes were my effort to give Stephanie a taste of Europe right here in Texas. I don't know if it actually resembled anything European, but being the great friend she is, Stephanie humored me anyway. This is why I miss her so much when she leaves town.

Streusel Cupcakes

Makes 24

2 1/2 c. all-purpose flour

1/2 tsp. baking soda

1 1/4 tsp. baking powder

1/2 tsp. coarse salt (I used sea salt)

1/2 c. plus 2 tablespoons (1 1/4 sticks) unsalted butter, room temperature

1 c. sugar

3 large eggs

1 1/2 tsp. pure vanilla extract

1 1/4 c. sour cream

Preheat oven to 350. Line muffin tins with baking cups. Whisk together flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt. Cream butter and sugar until pale and fluffy. Add eggs, one at a time, beating until each is incorporated, scraping down sides of bowl as needed. Stir in vanilla by hand. Add flour mixture and sour cream, stir until just combined. Divide batter evenly among lined cups. Sprinkle half the topping over cupcakes, pressing it into the batter. Sprinkle evenly with remaining topping. Bake, rotating tins halfway through, until golden brown and a cake tester inserted in centers comes out clean, about 20 minutes. Transfer tins to wire racks to cool completely before removing cupcakes (I don't have wire racks. I cool mine on my counter). To finish, drizzle with milk glaze.

Streusel Topping

2 1/4 c. all-purpose flour

3/4 c. packed dark-brown sugar

2 1/4 tsp. ground cinnamon

3/4 tsp. coarse salt

1/2 c. plus 2 tablespoons (1 1/4 sticks) unsalted butter, room temperature

Whisk together flour, brown sugar, cinnamon, and salt; cut in the butter using a pastry blender, your fingertips, or two table knives until combined (I used knives) but still crumbly. Refrigerate 30 minutes before using.

Milk Glaze

1 1/2 c. confectioners' sugar, sifted

3 tablespoons milk

Whisk together ingredients until smooth. Use immediately.

Red Velvet Cupcakes

Some facts about red velvet cake:

• It is thought to be a Southern food. However, during the 1920's, it was a signature dessert at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York. There was a popular urban legend/chain letter about a woman who asked for the recipe and was billed a large amount, similar to the Neiman Marcus cookie urban legend.
• Although most recipes call for red food coloring, the red color is supposed to come from the chemical reaction of vinegar and buttermilk in the recipe.
• You can also use beets to dye it red.
• Wikipedia credits its resurgence in popularity in recent years to it being featured in the movie Steel Magnolias, where it is the flavor of the groom's cake, which is shaped like an armadillo.

I have made red velvet cupcakes and red velvet homemade Oreos using a mix many times. In fact, I made red velvet cupcakes later that week with my friend Hannah for our ward Halloween party. However, this was my first opportunity to make it from scratch. The occasion? My friend Kim defended her dissertation the Wednesday before Halloween, and red velvet cupcakes are her favorite.

Here is a picture of me, Kim (on the left) and Martha, at a wedding in San Antonio.

Here's the recipe. It's pretty darn good. I made it with cream cheese frosting, even though Wikipedia says it is traditionally frosted with a butter roux or "flour frosting". I can't imagine how that could be good.

Some thoughts about this recipe:

• It uses a lot of red food coloring.
• The cupcakes are not as red as the ones you make from a mix.
• Think about those two. Disturbing, isn't it?
• Despite the cupcakes being more maroon than red, they were a hit. This may have something to do with the fact that Kim is a diehard Virginia Tech fan, and maroon happens to be one of their colors.
• Their other color is orange. I had a lot of orange sprinkles that I bought for Halloween.
• Its kind of weird to make someone cupcakes and decorate them in the colors of one university when you are celebrating their graduation from another university.
• Texas Tech's colors are red and black.
• I also have black sprinkles.

Speaking of sprinkles, when Hannah and I made cupcakes that week, I brought over all of the sprinkles I have collected. There were a lot. I am starting to think that, perhaps, my friends need to stage an intervention. Now that Kim is officially a doctor, maybe she'll intervene on my behalf.