Vanilla bean sour cream cupcakes with vanilla bean buttercream

Even though it's so early on in my cupcake journey, the unthinkable happened: I got sick of chocolate cake. Not like I'll never eat it again, just that I needed a break.

Why yes, that is washing sitting on the back of the couch in the background. Thanks for noticing.

A while ago in my internet 'research', I came across this recipe for what was billed as "the perfect white cupcake". I found that intruiging because a normal vanilla cake is still pretty yellow so I decided to give it a try. Plus, I love vanilla bean.

The cake itself is delicious - moist and a little crumbly, but still holds together well. It's white, but not pure white as advertised. I'm putting this down to the recipe being American - their butter seems to be much paler than ours, which would of course result in a much paler batter. Also, the recipe for the icing called for 'clear vanilla'. I have no idea what that is, but it seems overly manufactured, so I don't think it is something I would ever keep in my pantry, but it would obviously remove any colour added by regular vanilla essence or bean. I'm OK with having icing with little specks of vanilla seeds through it. I think it makes the cake look even more yummy.

Perfectly white cake? No. Yummy? Definitely.

The other weird thing about this recipe was the requirement for 'cake flour'. Google tells me this is a fine flour, high (or was it low??) in gluten. Google also tells me that a suitable substitute is 1 cup cake flour = 3/4 cup plain flour plus 2 tablespoons of corn flour. Whatever. It worked.

The sour cream in the cake seems to cancel out some of the sugariness of the icing. As I've mentioned before, I think a generous cake:icing ratio is important, but in this recipe, the cake really held it's own. Sometimes the icing turns out to be the hero, but here, I think it was a pretty good balance.

Now that's a good icing:cake ratio.

Would I make these again? Yes, but for a 'plain' vanilla cupcake, they're a bit labour intensive. These are more your gourmet vanilla cupcake, or for when you've got plenty of time and don't mind doing the washing up.

And as per usual, the buttercream recipe made far more than was required (even though the cake recipe made 18 cakes rather than the usual dozen - the preschool teachers were happy...). So the next recipe I've got in mind is going to use up the rest of the vanilla buttercream. I think I see a pattern forming.

Credit where credit's due: recipe is from Good Life Eats.