Strawberries 'n Cream Cupcakes

Recipe adapted from 500 Cupcakes & Muffins by Fergal Connolly

It was easy to pick this one out of the 500 because of the terrific photo on the book. This was the first time we experimented making our own self-raising flour and succeeded (Kind of?). We can't seem to find self-raising flour anywhere! Cupcakes are usually very easy to make if you have the right ingredients. And the recipe is very easy to tweak as well.

The yummy strawberries complemented the fluffiness of the whipped cream.

And the strawberry jam glaze gave it just the right kick of additional sweetness.

Jason noticed a semi-bitter aftertaste to the cupcake whenever we substitute the self-raising flour with a regular flour and baking soda mixture. Fortunately, the enticing aroma of vanilla in the cupcake, the just-right fluffy sweetness of the whipped cream icing, and the fresh fruity sourness of the strawberries gave life to this simple dessert, making it an enjoyable yet easy-to-make snack. Plus the cupcake is absolute eye candy, perfect for impressing house guests and visitors!

Just a note: if you don't like your cupcake smothered with too much icing, you can halve the amount of whipped cream indicated on the recipe. That way it'll be just right for the cupcakes produced. The book says one recipe makes a dozen and a half cupcakes, but we made kind of small-sized ones and we managed to produce 2 dozens.

Classic Apple Pie

We've always settled for store-bought Apple Pie but it doesn't exactly give you that homey feeling you get from home-baked ones so we figured we would take a crack at it. And boy, the only thing that cracked was the crust dough every time we tried to drape it over the pie tin.

We used the recipe from Caroline Mi Li Artiss, an adorable rising YouTube celebrity chef. She did it with such ease we were expecting to breeze through the whole process like she did. Well I guess that's the difference between certified chefs and wannabes like us.

We followed all her instructions to the best of our abilities, but we tried to cool our dough longer than suggested since it felt so soft even after half an hour in the fridge. Extra cooling didn't work either, which means we probably did something wrong with the dough mixture. Too much butter, maybe? We had to piece the chunks of dough together to form the crust. Thanks to the egg wash, our pie turned out like this:

Pie-making is like an art; it takes time to master. We did try out the technique Caroline taught us, which was hanging the crust on the rolling pin and lifting it over the pie tin, but something in the way we made the dough made it nearly impossible to do that. And everybody knows a good pie starts with a good crust.

When the moment of truth came, aka the pie-cutting time, it was a bit difficult to cut an actual slice because everything kept falling off. But when we finally did cut a piece the taste wasn't as disappointing as our crust-making. The sweet yet tangy taste of the apple filling was great. The crust was a little dry but if eaten along with the filling, pretty good.

We're sure that Caroline's is a million times better than ours. We can only hope to make one as good as hers someday. In the meantime, let's seal this off as a learning experience. Maybe after enough practice, we'll remake this recipe and actually succeed!