May Flours: Cake Flour

I know I'm starting out with a commonly-used flour, but I HAD to for my entry into CupCakeCamp Toronto!

From the Wheat flour Wikipedia entry:

Cake flour is a finely milled white flour made from soft wheat. It has very low protein content, between 8% and 10%, making it suitable for soft-textured cakes and cookies. The higher protein content of other flours would make the cakes tough. Highly sifted cake flours may require different volume amounts in recipes than all-purpose flour.

I heard of an amazing recipe in the BakeBakeBake Livejournal community called "Woody's Luxury Lemon Cake". Adapted from Rose's Heavenly Cakes, this amazing cake combined white chocolate and lemon to make what sounded like a mind-blowing taste experience. I picked this monster cookbook up from the library and set to work on converting this recipe into mini-cupcakes for CupCakeCamp.

I won't post this copyrighted recipe in my blog, but let me assure you that based on this recipe alone, I will be spending the $50 to buy this book. It was a white chocolate cake with lemon zest, filled with homemade lemon curd, and topped with a buttercream made out of a white chocolate vanilla bean custard base mixed with some of the lemon curd OMG YUM.

I'm not going to lie, this was a complicated recipe. It wasn't difficult, but it was process-heavy and thus time-consuming. When it came time to decorate, I was far too tired to cut out, paint and hand-detail 4-dozen tiny fondant lemons like I'd intended, so I tossed a few gold dragees on each and sprinkled them with edible/non-toxic 24 karat gold dust. They sure looked luxurious after that!

I was a planner and volunteer for the event, so I spent most of my time in the back room at CupCakeCamp plating cupcakes, separating out and labeling samples of each to be judged, and helping to organize people and tasks. However, I was able to take a few breaks from the back room and come out and serve cupcakes, as well as present the ones that I made. I was happy to say that mine flew off the trays pretty quickly; not only were they rather fetching looking, but people were super impressed that these cupcakes were covered in real gold!

I was quite surprised and pleased to win the award of "Most Impressive Amateur", and accepted my prize with a giddy combination of jumping and spinning. I never win ANYTHING, so it was kind of awesome. In the prize bag I got a copy of Hello Cupcake!, some Wall-E cupcake liners, a 4-section shaker of Wilton sprinkles in different colours and shapes, and a necklace with a cupcake pendant! I'm wearing it right now, and it's totally cute.

Check out this slideshow of other people's photos. Other than the first two I took during and after the decorating process, I wasn't able to take any pics of my own at the event because I was in the back, but other attendees and bakers took some photos of my cupcakes so I yoinked them and compiled them below:

Sweet success!