WHAT'S WRONG WITH MY CUPCAKES? How to Get Perfect Cupcakes Every Time | Cupcake Jemma

[Music] hello and welcome to crumbs and doilies h2 now obviously we're a cupcake company so we've made our fair share of cupcakes over the years and by this point you hope that we had it just right in the we were making an all perfect and personally I've made probably over a million cupcakes myself since I started crumbs and doilies so I reckon I've got a few tips I can show you because you regularly asked me how to do it and why certain things happen in your ovens or why it's come out looking this shape and what you want is to end up with something like this so I'm gonna show you how to bake the perfect cupcake at lots of things that can contribute to a not perfect cupcake and there's a very small amount of things that contribute to the perfect cupcake so hopefully this video is going to help you decipher which ones are which and the first thing I'm going to start with is the butter now obviously most of my recipes are butter based and so this tutorial will be for those recipes only not things like the chocolate batter because they're oily and butter needs to be just right before you use it so I quite often in my videos refer to as squeezably soft texture and I'm going to show you what that is so let's start with a to soft butter so if you live in a very very hot country where room temperature is like stiflingly hot then this might just happen naturally at room temperature which is very unfortunate so I would recommend it you should keep your butter in the fridge until you need it and only get it out like maybe an hour or so before because if you soften your butter too much or if you leave it out in the warm place for too long or if you even cheat and use the microwave for too long what you end up with is a really oily butter so this has got no resistance to it at all I'm putting my finger in it and it's just literally disappearing into a smushy greasy pile of world butter and I will show you what happens with that kind of butter when we bake it but for now I move on to the hard butter so quite often a lot of recipes will say butter at room temperature but what does that even mean because if your room is in Alaska it's gonna be cold and if your Rimmer's in sub-saharan Africa it's gonna be quite hot I imagine so room temperature doesn't really mean anything what you're looking for is a consistency and this butter is much too firm so this has only been out of the fridge for about half an hour and it's very resistant under my thumb so when I try and squeeze it it's actually quite difficult to make any kind of shape happen so I'll show you what happens with that butter later but what does the perfect butter look like well I always describe it a squeezably soft so when I squeeze it it wants to be a little bit resistant not as resistant as the hard and not as completely on resistant as the soft obviously somewhere in the middle just right as you can see when I push into it it does give a little bit but it's not kind of coming off on my finger and a greasy globule it's holding its shape fairly well and it's not going Ollie and gross like the very soft butter so this is where you want your butter to be and obviously those three are very different and they do have a different effect on the batter and the end result I'm going to show you what that's like so to demonstrate I'm just gonna be using my regular vanilla cupcake recipe which you can find in the description box below so I've already got my dry ingredients here and I'm gonna add first of all with a hard butter and I'll just add my eggs as well [Music] [Music] right so this has been mixing for the amount of time that I would expect to be mixing some cupcake batter which I'll go into a little bit more detail about that later but I can already identify some massive problems with this batter one is that it has not mixed the batter at the buzzer in at all so there's big lumps of butter in my butter this is very hard to say so it's also quite yellow in color and it's not a very nice consistency it's quite sort of sloppy and it looks a little bit split as well and because it hasn't incorporated with all the ingredients properly but I'm going to scoop them out and see what happens all right that's all the batter and I've only managed to get 11 cupcakes out of it and that's because the butter hasn't been whipping up with the mix so it's lacking in a little bit of air so I don't hold much tape for these guys but I'm gonna put them in the oven anyway okay we'll see how those work out but for now I'm gonna do the soft butter [Music] this one does look a little bit more promising obviously all the butter has incorporated it's gone very very pale a lot paler than before and it certainly looks like cake batter but if you look very closely it is quite kind of silky and oily but I'm just gonna scoop it and bake it and see how it turns out so all that remains is to work with the perfect butter and I'm pretty sure these are gonna turn out perfectly right so this looks much more like it it's not as sort of sloppy and gross as the first one and it's not as pale and fluffy as the last one with the soft butter so let's see how this one goes [Music] Wow we have some seriously different cupcakes here and I know which ones I prefer but let's start with the hard butter versions so these have really peaked in the middle like they've gone like volcanoes so I do get a lot of questions about how to avoid that and why is this happening it's probably because you've used butter that's too hard guys and so as you can see it hasn't risen hardly at all except in the middle so you've got a horrible empty bit around the edge and a peak in the middle so they've also got this kind of not very nice dark crust on the top mace ly because the bus hasn't incorporated so it's basically just sugar and eggs and flour in there if it's them it's kind of created a bit of a sugary crust and it's sort of dark on the outside and very yellow on the inside so if I peel it off the case really super short and it's got quite a greasy bottom but let's see what's going on inside so it's very yellow and quite sort of dense actually I'm not fluffy at all it doesn't really appeal to me but let's see what the soft butter one has to in store so when these came out of the oven they were really poofy and they didn't actually look that unattractive it kind of reminds me a bit of a souffle but as they've cooled down they have really shrunk so they've kind of pulled in the paper cases so they're night they're like thin and not very attractive and obviously you can see as it's kind of the souffle poof as has collapsed it is sunk in the middle which obviously is not what you want either let's see what goes on inside this one so what we've got here are a lot of big air pockets which is not ideal and also where it's sunk it's created this kind of denser texture so it's not an even crumb at all oh my gosh the pressure is on let's see what the perfect ones are doing so these have all risen really evenly there is no dramatic peak they're not even rounded they are sort of gently rounded so they're not like SuperDuper flat but they're just flat enough so this is the perfect kind of cupcake for decorating because over so you're not having to battle against any lumps and bumps so this has come out really nice we've got a much more even air bubble a distribution it's very sort of fluffy it's not like ridiculously yellow but it smells great and I am gonna just taste it to make sure mmm YUM it's really soft but barely they're crushed on the outside mmm that's perfect so that's the butter dealt with now I'm gonna move on to the mixing time now obviously I most often use a free-standing mixer like this so all of our methods here at the crumbs and doilies are using these as well and therefore this tip video is basically for those of you who are using electricity to help you make your cakes if you're using a wooden spoon and your muscles hmm this might be a little bit difficult for you because it's all about timing so you can under mix your batter and you can most definitely overmixed your batter what we want is the perfect bit in between so to start with I'm gonna under mix my batter so I've got almost all my ingredients just going to add a couple so I'm just gonna barely mix this and obviously I'll be putting the milk and vanilla in as well and I'll barely mix that part as well and let's see what happens [Music] [Music] okay that was a total of around 16 seconds not including the bit where I had it on a low speed and was adding the milk but not very long obviously a little bit like when we use the too hard butter it's a bit kind of sloppy and sticky like it hasn't incorporated very well at all so let's see how are we going oh I've only got 11 cupcakes out of my batch of supposedly 12 that's because I haven't had time to get any air into it but let's bake them and see how they get on so now it's time for the over mixing so I'm getting my batter ready and this time I'm gonna go crazy and just kind of always forget about it and mix it for ages [Music] [Music] this is volumize so it is gone very very pale I'm very very fluffy which you know if we're making certain kinds of cakes is exactly what we want but with this all-in-one method that I use most of the time and the method that I use quite often for you guys it's definitely not not what we want because there's just way too much air being put into this batter but I'll prove it it's like when I bake them alright let's get these in the oven and see where they turn out like now it's time for the perfect mix so usually when I make this recipe I tell you guys to mix it for a minute after the eggs and the butter and the dry ingredients are gone in so let's do that [Music] now obviously I haven't mentioned the speed at any point and that's because you're all going to be doing different things potentially with different mixes but I usually keep it on a medium to high speed so nothing that's going my way and nothing that's like move somewhere ever tricky so now it's time for my milk and vanilla and then that gets sped up to the medium-high speed again 30 seconds okay so the 30 seconds are up and I'm just gonna give it a quick scrape around just to make sure that all the bits at the bottom and the sides in the gang and then all it needs after that is another 10 15 seconds maximum just to incorporate everything and that's it sort of somewhere in between the previous two but a little bit controlled and actually not that difficult to estimate actually a minute and a half a minute so it's looking a lot similar actually to some of the other batters that we've made but I am pretty convinced that this is going to turn out just right [Music] so one thing I should mention is that there is exactly the right amount of batter in here even after I've scraped the bowl quite thoroughly enough for 12 so that's obviously spot-on so now I'm gonna bake these as usual and compare them with the others Wow so one of these is really standing out as a horrendous cupcake but the under mixed batter actually doesn't look too bad but let's look at it a bit more in detail so first of all I've only got eleven cakes out of my preferred dozens and that's not ideal I can see that they are quite yellow in color and also I can feel that they have quite a sort of hard crust on the outside they've also almost started to peak so we've got much more of a humped shape on them rather than the kind of gentle round shape that I like so let's see what's happening inside now these actually aren't as bad as I thought they were gonna be but what I would say is that there's quite a lot of grease there's a big lot of grease around the paper case edge and also when I squeeze even lightly on the cake I get very greasy fingers which is not what you want you don't want to have a greasy residue in your mouth or in your hands or anything really so that for me is a bit of a fail now that overmix are just epic fails I think you will agree that these are some of the ugliest cupcakes that hopefully you will ever see come out of this kitchen and they're not even gonna leave this kitchen again I go in the bin so what's happened is they've got much too much air in again when they come up came out the oven and they were very souffle like and they looked quite spectacular and as they have cooled down they've shrunk it and they pulled in the case even further than the other soft butter and so now these are like the weird little even know what they like a little with little cups because they've also sunk in the middle they're just ugly but you know let's have a go on the inside so these are incredibly uneven they've got a completely different color going from top to bottom light at the bottom and really sort of dense and weird at the top where it's sort of sunk and shrunk so this is absolutely a massive fail you would not want to eat this cupcake now we come to the perfect cupcake so these look magnificent they've got a lovely even rise on them they've got a lovely even color none of the sides are coming away there's been no shrinkage they're still quite sort of snug and the same size as the tin so there's been no shrinkage so I reckon these are going to be super inside so that looks perfect guys so I guess the rules to take away from that is don't over mix your batter don't forget about it I do also get asked a lot about some of my bigger cake recipes and whether they can adapt those recipes for cupcakes and quite a lot of those recipes or creaming methods so they'll be creaming the butter in the sugar and then adding the eggs and flour for example which is basically going to be a little bit like over mixing for cupcakes it's just they can't take that amount of air so the all-in-one methods perfect and that's why I give it to you guys so if you're going to do anything wrong I would say even just under mix it slightly if you're going to go one way or the other but just over mixing bad bad bad now the final thing I'm going to show you is what happens when your oven is lying to you because quite often the oven says it's one temperature on the dial but inside it's completely different and that is the case of the world over with all the ovens so you're going to have to get to know your oven and hopefully you're in a place where you can do that I do get a lot of emails actually asking how I can bake my recipes about another and the answer really is I have no idea if any of you do know that please put it in the description box below for the other guys I highly recommend getting an oven thermometer especially when you're just starting out baking and you don't quite know your oven well enough yeah so obviously I will always give you a temperature for my recipes normally with this kind of cupcake it's 170 degrees C so it's very important that the your oven is that that temperature these two trays have butter from the same load I'm going to show you what happens when your oven is too hot or too cold so these look very very different to each other obviously over here we have the ones that have been in the hotter oven so clearly they have overcooked a little bit they're way too Brown they've also got quite a lot of peaking happening and what that is is once you put your cakes into the oven the top start heating up way quicker than anything else so it creates this basically a crust and then everything else are underneath it is trying to burst its way through so that's why you end up getting these sort of volcanic eruptions in your cake sometimes they even look a lot like volcanic eruptions and have like batter kind of bursting out but these ones are just not not very nice and there's still a little bit warm but from experience I know that these are going to cool down and be quite dry and not a very nice crumb on them at all but let's have a look inside anyway so this is obviously got a very thick crust all the way around it top to bottom and side to side and it's already drying because I can easily knock off nuggets of it without really trying too hard so that's not going to be very nice to eat ultimately let's move on to the cooler now these are very anemic looking they're very very pale yellow obviously a contrast to the dark brown maybe slightly more appealing but not much so what I will also say is that for every single experiment I've done in this video I've cooked the cupcakes for the same amount of time but for these ones I had to add extra time because otherwise they would have just been like liquid so I ended up adding 6 minutes which is quite a significant amount of time and they're still looking really really pale and what happened is they've cooked low and slow so they've kind of oozed out of their paper cases and it's not because I've put too much batter and I've put the same amount of batter as I have for all the other cakes but these ones have just kind of cooked lower and slower and they are also sinking in the middle just ever so slightly which is obviously not what we want either and that's because it's kind of pushed up and then kind of wilted yeah when it hasn't had the heat to give it that structural integrity and I reckon that the inside is going to be pretty gross so this looks quite pale inside the crumb isn't too bad but it's coming away from the paper case mega easily so what may happen over time before you even ice them is that they will just pull away on their own from their paper cases and that might happen with some of the other techniques like the hard butter that sometimes happens too but these are not very nice you do want a little bit of caramelization just to give it some flavor also what can I say about this it is just kind of falling apart it's also really moist and damp but not in a nice way and when you when you put it in your mouth it's gonna go and basically into like a ball of starch which is not ideal and that is that hopefully I have given you enough to go on so that you can go away and make the perfect cupcake therefore saving the world from you know potentially tens or even hundreds of thousands of dozens of cupcakes that could potentially go in the bin because they are not perfect so good luck out there guys I hope that your cupcakes turn out all perfect from now on with using these tips and tricks if I've missed anything please pop it in the comments box below and I will do my best to answer if you have any other questions in the meantime I'll be back next week with a cake decoration in a video so tune in for that and if you haven't yet subscribed to my channel then please do so by clicking on the link but also click on the little bell and that way you'll get notified every time I upload so you don't miss anything anyway I've got a lot of very unpleasant cakes to get rid of now so I will see you soon bye

Channel: CupcakeJemma

Views: 2,720,880

Rating: 4.9285131 out of 5

Keywords: Cupcake, cupcake jemma, jemma, gemma, cupcakes, bake, baking, how to make, recipe, crumbs & doilies, baker, buttercream, cake, cakes, vanilla, chocolate, jemma wilson, crumbs and doilies, bakery, perfect, easy, home made, hand made, simple, fool proof, vanilla cupcakes, troubleshooting, what's wrong with my, pointy, sunk, sinking, sinks, shallow, crusty, soft, fluffy, flat cupcakes

Id: oC6x6y_o80Y

Length: 21min 54sec (1314 seconds)

Published: Thu May 02 2019