billy's bakery vanilla vanilla cupcakes

It's weird that there are no dedicated cupcake shops in Melbourne. I think Sydney has half a dozen. If you Google cupcakes/Melbourne there are quite a few entries for shops that sell them, but they don't specialise. They are several mentions of Crabapple Bakery cupcakes, but on the two occasions I've bought theirs - once from Prahran Market and once from the Bayswater factory shop - though they looked great they were stale and dry.

Yesterday I made cupcakes using a recipe from Billy's Bakery in New York. I found the recipe here a while back, and my friend Robyn's birthday was a great excuse to try it out.

I made the effort to source and purchase American cake flour from here, and the cakes did seem very light and airy as a result. I'm not sure if substituting the same amount of plain flour would be ok. I've seen Australian cake flour in the supermarket recently - I'll definitely be buying some and trying it out next time. Because U.S. cup and spoon measurements are slightly different to ours, here are the amounts I used after conversion :

Billy's Vanilla Vanilla Cupcakes (Makes 24)

All ingredients should be at room temperature:

200g cake flour

150g plain flour

300g caster sugar

15g baking powder

1/2 tspn salt

250g softened unsalted butter, cut into 1-cm cubes

4 large eggs

237 ml milk

1 tspn pure vanilla extract

The method used, i.e. the dry ingredients are combined with the butter and a minimum amount of liquid, rather than the traditional creaming method, is one I've used before, as recommended by Rose Levy Beranbaum in her book The cake bible. She says "the method is faster, easier, and virtually eliminates any possibility of toughening the cake by overbeating."

I got to use my fancy new icecream scoop rather than my old plastic one which had lost its emptying thingy. Sheer bliss!

I halved the amount of Billy's vanilla buttercream, and it was just the right amount for the 24 cupcakes :

125g unsalted butter

3-4 cups icing sugar

1/4 cup milk

1/2 tspn pure vanilla extract.

Happy birthday Robyn!