Infinite Minis

Wow. Baking today was, for lack of better words, crazy.+/-

So I decided to bake some cupcakes for tomorrow's midweek as a snack. But it's an all church women's midweek, so I would need a lot of whatever I make. The decision came to mini cupcakes. They're small enough where you can just pop them in your mouth and stretch the cake batter to feed over 60. Plus, I wanted to make a chocolate chip something, so making them mini would make them kinda related to cookies. Kinda. I start making the cake batter according to the recipe and the first mistake I made was putting the whole stick of butter into the mix instead of the 5 1/3 tablespoons like it said. I saw it on the box but forgot to complete the mental note I guess. Seriously, it was "Oh, 5 1/3 tablespoons, got itOHMYGOSH STICK OF BUTTER" *dump*. It didn't make that much of a difference at first, but then I realized the batter didn't taste as sweet as the other times. It was because of the excess butter, plus it's salted! It still tasted ok, just not that sweet. After that fail, I went looking for a mini muffin pan, of which we only have one. That holds 12. And is dark. "I can work with this" I thought, so I spooned the batter into the mini cupcake holders and put them into the oven. Deciding on an oven temperature and proper baking time was tough, because normally you decrease the temperature by 25 degrees for dark pans, but I also saw something where you could decrease the baking time by some minutes. But I looked up times for mini cupcakes and they only take about 9 to 15 minutes, so they wouldn't even be in the oven that long if the time were decreased o_O. So decreasing it by 25 worked. I guess I overfilled some of the minis because after the max suggested time they still weren't completely done! They took about as long as regular cupcakes did, which was odd. Maybe it was because of the butter. Once the first batch was done, I took them out and let them cool. I tasted one, and it wasn't that sweet. So I decided to compensate by making a really good frosting to go on top. I started the second batch and realized how much batter was still left! It literally took 5-6 batches for all the minis to get done. It made so many! I seriously thought they weren't going to end. I had to pray toward the end that the batter wouldn't make any more cupcakes as it took so long to get them done. Over 60 minis came out of that batter:

Some of the covers were coming off of them, which is probably from the excess butter. These cupcakes drove me nearly insane lol. And I wanted to not overdo it with the chocolate chips as I have a tendency to add a lot of something extra to something else, so I put less in there than I would normally put in something. Unfortunately, more chips would have been better, as there weren't that many in each mini! After over 2 hours of trying to use that nearly endless cake batter up, it was (finally) time to start the frosting. Here, to contrast with the chocolate chipness, I decided to make a regular vanilla buttercream frosting. Since I kinda messed up the cupcakes by overdoing it with the butter, I chose to stay on the safe side and use unsalted butter for the frosting and add salt as needed for flavor. Also, my mom got vanilla and other flavored extracts this weekend, so there was no having to ration out the flavors, unlike the cupcakes in the previous post lol.

The frosting turned out very nice and sweet, so I tried it on a cupcake to see how the flavors acted together (unlike the frost and go from the last cake...). It was kinda odd, the cupcake was very rich and the frosting was rich and sweet, but it was a nice strange combo. So I filled up the pastry bag and was ready to decorate these really small mini thingies. With a huge pastry bag.

My mom suggested that I do a "three tier star" sort of thing, where you pipe one star, then do a smaller one on top, and a smaller one on top of that one. So that's what happened. They turned out really cute, but toward the end I got worried that I would run out of frosting! Yes, it was that many cupcakes haha. It worked out, but some of the larger ones needed some extra frosting to cover some more surface area. The end result was pretty cool:

There were so many minis that I ended up using both cake holders to house them. The little remainder in the second cake holder might just stay home, though, since it's just a bit excessive to be bringing two cake holders if one only has 12 XD. After all that, I really don't ever want to work with minis again. But maybe that's something to experiment on so I can get better at it. Right now, though, I just want to work with normal cakes and cupcakes. And actually follow the recipe correctly this time. Hopefully these will still go over well at midweek tomorrow :D.