Making vanilla cupcakes with my favorite little girl

No, I don’t have any kid of my own that I have been hiding from you! Back in the Spring I spent a couple of months meeting weekly with one of the sweetest little girls, Carla (of course, not as sweet as your kids…one’s own kids are always the sweetest but I don’t have any, so I am very happy of having her from time to time).  What I used to do with Carla was not a normal babysitting. We were meeting once per week for an hour so that she could have some Italian conversation (she used to go at the school where I teach) and to bake! Yes, to bake. One hour per week I got to speak Italian and bake with Carla. Is there a better job than that? It doesn’t even feel like a job. Needles too say, I always had a lot of fun!

Since last Thursday, my weekly hour of fun with Carla is back into my life. How cool is that! I decided to regularly blog about our baking experiments! They are experiments because, as with my blog, every week we try a new recipe, and not one that I necessarily tested already. Also, cooking and baking with a six year old is not like doing it with a teenager! There still are many things that she can’t do but there are also many things that she can’t do but can learn on the way, with me. That is double cool!

We usually do everything from scratch and I think the hardest task is to find recipes we can really make in 1 hour only. [That exclude yeast goods for example, but I want one day to figure out how to make them with her.] This time, though we did not make everything from scratch. The cupcakes were, of course. But not the frosting. The fact is the other day was a very special day: her sixth birthday! [And like her mom told me, she is a very proud six-year-old kid J ] So I thought it would be fun to put aside the “do-from-scratch” rule to have her instead color some icing and decorate the cupcakes in the way she preferred. Again, needless to say, we had a blast! I don’t use icing that much but bringing her all the colors, showing her toothpick method and letting her do all the job was great. For her, that meant a great sense of achievement! Without mentioning she got to eat the cupcakes as an afternoon snack!

Let’s see what I can figure out for us to make next week. I want something fall/autumn related. Any suggestion?

Vanilla Cupcakes

Ingredients

Makes 9 cupcakes

130 gr (4.5 oz or 1 cup) all purpose flour

7 gr (1 ½ tsp) baking powder

1 pinch of salt

150 gr (5.3 oz or ¾ cup) sugar

75 gr (1/3 cup) unsalted butter, at room temperature

1 large egg

175 ml (¾ cup) milk

2 ml (½ tsp) vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 325F degrees and prepare the muffin pan with muffin paper liners.

In a medium bowl, sift the flour, the baking powder, and the salt and mix them.

In another bowl, mix the sugar and the butter until you obtain a soft cream. Stir in the egg and mix well. 

Gradually add the milk and the vanilla extract.

Finally, stir in the flour mixture and mix with a wooden spoon or a spatula until all the ingredients are well incorporated and the batter is smooth.

Spoon the batter into the muffin liners. Bake for about 20-25 minutes (depending on the oven) until the cupcakes are golden and they spring back when gently pressed.

Cool completely on a cooling rack before frosting them

Have a sweet day!