Thanksgiving Cupcake Disaster

It's Thanksgiving and I'm at my parents place.  I just took the Mac and Cheese out of the oven and we're going to sit down to our family Thanksgiving meal at 2pm.

But I was up and at it early this morning.  I woke early because after reading through recipes, I decided last night that I was going to make Almond Cupcakes.  I love almond-flavored items.  In fact, my favorite drink is the amaretto sour.  So I took myself to Fairway last night, which surprisingly wasn't very crowded because I needed to get ground almonds/almond flour/almond meal and I just wasn't sure that Stop and Shop would have it.  Let me just say, almond meal is crazy expensive.  I paid close to $10 for a 16 oz. bag of the stuff.  As I saw it ring up, I thought, these cupcakes better be good.

Back to today...the butter was soft, my baking utensils were prepped and ready, the muffin pan was lined and the oven was pre-heated.  I followed the directions to the letter...cream butter and sugar, beat in eggs, add cream and almond extract. By the way, Fairway doesn't have regular extracts i.e. McCormick, so I had to get some organic and all-natural extract.  You would think that would mean the extract would be at its strongest because it's without impurities etc. But it simply smelled less potent.  Give me unnatural and inorganic extract! ahaha Then I sifted in the flour and folded in the almond meal.  After doing this final step, I could see and feel that the batter was very heavy.  Usually when I spoon batter into a pan, it's more liquid, but this batter had a more solid quality.  Then when I tasted it, it wasn't particularly sweet.  But I thought, it'll all work out, I'm sure it'll be fine.

Well, it wasn't fine.  I'll admit, I'm not quite in sync with my oven...it's big, it's old, it's gas powered and I think it gets and stays hotter than any other oven I've ever used.  So I had already decided not to leave the cupcakes in the oven for as long as the recipe stated, but even taking them out early couldn't save this batch of cupcakes.  They were hard, dry and damn near flavorless.

I called my mom and said, "these cupcakes are bad, I can't bring them over to have as dessert."  Thankfully, mommy said not to worry about it, because she had pie.

So on this Thanksgiving, I'm thankful that mommy has been cooking and making desserts much longer than I and that mommy and daddy did enjoy my dinner contribution.  Happy Thanksgiving!