Hello,
I made orange cupcakes yesterday and all of them turn out to have a lot of brown specks all over the top, sides, and bottom. Not the inside though. I have attached an image of my cupcakes. The ingredients are :
Butter and sugar creamed together.
Eggs
Orange zest and juice
Flour
Baking powder
Salt
Milk
Bake at 350F for 20minutes. I have never had issues with cupcakes before. Does anyone know what caused those brown specks? All my ingredients are still good, none near the expiry date.
You have several things going on there I think
The domed cracked tops indicate The cupcakes were baked at too high temperature.
The spots are burnt bits zest.
Despite the domed cracked tops, you have a low rise. The amount of batter is determined in part by mixing. Under mixing will result in less batter. Creaming of butter and sugar is not intended to mixi two ingredients. Rather it is mechanical leavening—it is to expand the batter. The sugar crystals cut through the butter creating air pockets. if you do not cream the butter and sugar long enough you will not have expanded the batter enough.
Your cupcakes have not even risen to the top of the baking cup liners. A batch of cupcake batter does not proportion like that and does not rise low like like.
That low rise indicates your batter was under mixed.
So your butter was not properly incorporated into your batter.
When you don’t have a proper emulsification of your batter, the sugar doesn’t fully dissolve into the batter, and the fat (butter) floats it to the top.
You get lower rise, a thicker crust, and spots where the sugar hasn’t dissolved.
look up Stella Park’s article on creaming butter and sugar on the website serious eats. Most people cream butter and sugar incorrectly. The cream butter at the wrong temperature.
But here’s the other thing, Creaming method is not the best for mixing cupcakes. Cakes are very small. The rapid expansion in a small space more often than not causes a rapid deflation and cooling. A small cake just can’t take all that aeration.
The all in one mixing method or reverse creaming are probably better mixing methods. If you’re in the UK, Jemma of Crumbs and Dollies has a website with a ton of recipes in which she uses the all in one method.
Reverse creaming is a take on commercial high ratio cake mixing. For reverse creaming see link.
To make these cakes, I use the reverse creaming method, as opposed to the more common creaming method. Instead of beating air into the sugar and butter, adding the eggs then stirring in the dry ingredients, the reverse creaming method requires the butter to be rubbed into the dry ingredients...
www.epicurious.com
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