Cake

Salted caramels, including chocolate varieties, have become quite popular in recent years; a touch of salt draws out caramel’s buttery taste and highlights the sweetness. This cupcake, created with the candy’s popularity in mind, serves as an excellent incentive to try your hand at making caramel at home. The soft caramel centers hide under a piped peak of satiny chocolate frosting. Fleur de sel, a type of sea salt prized for its distinctive flavor, is available at specialty stores; if you can’t find it, you may substitute another sea salt, such as Maldon.

Calling all coconut lovers: These cupcakes get intense flavor from ground sweetened coconut and coconut milk in the batter, billowy seven-minute frosting spiked with coconut extract, and a garnish of unsweetened coconut flakes (available at natural-food stores). Be sure to buy only unsweetened coconut milk, not the sweeter varieties (such as Coco Lopez) used to make mixed drinks.

The old campfire classic takes on a new identity as a charming cupcake. Graham flour, available at health-food stores and specialty markets, flavors the cupcake base, which is topped with chocolate glaze and piled high with piped sticky marshmallow frosting, browned to mimic the effects of toasting over a fire.

Celebrating the guest of honor is as easy as A-B-C with these letter-cookie cupcake toppers. To create the cookies, cut rounds from sugar cookie cutouts (two different sizes are shown, but just one will do), then cut a letter from the inside of each round with a mini cookie cutter (see Sources, page 342). Instead of a single letter, you can make a set of cookies featuring the entire alphabet (you will need a couple more cupcakes to show them off), a great idea for a party full of preschoolers just learning their letters.

You will likely make these cupcakes again and again, varying the frosting (say, dark chocolate, page 302) and sprinkles (sparkly, multicolored, or otherwise) to suit your whim or fancy. Two types of flour contribute to the cupcakes’ singular texture: Cake flour makes for a delicate crumb, while all-purpose flour keeps them from being too tender.

Fanciful peaks in a spectrum of shades crown cupcakes with a motif inspired by a vintage Russian cookbook. You could also opt to use just one color of frosting, or leave it untinted. White cupcakes, made with egg whites only (instead of whole eggs), are very light and delicate. For a stronger vanilla flavor, scrape the seeds of one vanilla bean (halved lengthwise) into the milk in step one, and omit vanilla extract.

Make your own sweet garden with an array of cupcakes in bloom. One batch of Swiss meringue buttercream (page 304) is enough to decorate two dozen cupcakes, including the piped flower versions. See Sources, page 342, for where to find the tools and candies used below.

A well-loved American layer cake is scaled down to cupcake form. Golden raisins give these cakes added texture, but you can omit them. You can also add one cup walnuts or pecans; toast them as directed on page 323, let cool, then finely chop before stirring into the batter at the end, after the flour mixture. Unfrosted carrot cupcakes make delicious snacks.

Mint-infused milk, along with mint extract, adds flavor (but not color) to pale buttercream; the dark chocolate cupcakes are also flavored with mint. A cluster of chocolate mint leaves on top suggests the primary flavor component of the finished treat. The leaves may admittedly not be an “any day” endeavor, but they can be prepared a day or so in advance. You can, of course, serve the cupcakes without any topping other than the frosting, or garnish them with a few chocolate curls (see page 323) shaved from a mint-flavored bar.

Spell out a birthday wish—or whatever your celebration calls for—with homemade dot letters on a big bunch of cupcakes. The colorful letters (and numbers) are made of tinted royal icing piped onto parchment paper and allowed to harden before they’re placed atop the cupcakes. To save time on the day of the party, pipe the decorations the day before.

Kids of all ages are bound to adore white cupcakes studded with chocolate morsels. Whipped egg whites folded into the batter produce a light and airy crumb. Tossing the chocolate chips with a bit of flour helps ensure they will be distributed throughout, rather than sink to the bottoms as they bake. The chocolate frosting is so rich and satiny, you’ll want to pair it with other cupcakes in this book, especially yellow buttermilk (page 26) and devil’s food (page 34).

These beautiful piped-flower cupcakes seem to have been just been picked from a spring garden. They may look intimidating, but with a bit of practice (on parchment paper), you should be able to produce the piped designs with relative ease. Stems can be trickier than they appear, so be sure to also try out a few of these; pipe too quickly and the stems break, too slowly, and they won’t be straight. (Any breaks may be filled in with more buttercream.) Before piping onto cupcakes, lightly mark the pattern on the frosting with a skewer or toothpick. When piping, use your writing hand to hold and squeeze the bag near the top and your other hand to steady and steer the tip.

This recipe is used to make the brownie hearts on page 213; some of the batter is baked in muffin tins, the rest in an 8-inch pan for cutting into heart-shaped toppers.

Pastel-colored gelato is used to top mini cupcakes, but you can substitute sorbet or ice cream. The one-bowl vanilla cupcakes are baked in paper nut cups, available at craft-supply stores (see Sources, page 342), or you can use mini muffin tins lined with paper liners. For an authentic Italian touch, serve with small plastic ice-cream spoons.

There’s nothing to fear from these stealthy sharks, whose paper fins peek out from waves of blue buttercream. Alongside is a cupcake made to resemble a sandy dune, with graham-cracker crumbs and a paper parasol.

Cheery marzipan ladybugs nestled in a piped buttercream lawn make adorable cupcakes. Once you get the hang of piping the frosting into blades of grass, the work moves very quickly; meanwhile, you can enlist children to help form the bugs.

In Austria, where this handsome dessert originated, linzertorte is enjoyed all year long, but its festive red-and-gold palette makes it especially popular at holiday celebrations. The cookielike crust, rich with ground almonds, is layered with raspberry jam and crisscrossed into a windowpane pattern.