"I just made the most delightful batch of gray cupcakes!"

Alternate title: 

"Brain food-- gray matter"

It was after dinner. I knew I wanted to bake something sweet and I knew there was no chocolate in the house, so I opted for a vanilla cupcake recipe, which is not my usual go-to. If you ever want to bake me anything, know that I respond quite well to chocolate. 

I started with this Martha Stewart recipe for vanilla cupcakes. Because our apartment has been infested by mold/mildew and I found today that many of my cupcake tins were mildewed, I quartered this recipe so I could use the 1 pan that wasn't ruined, which happened to be a 6-cupcake pan. Also, if there were 24 cupcakes in the house, I'd eat them all due to despair and frustration from the aforementioned mildew problem. By this point I've only eaten 2 cupcakes, half a tub of hummus, and have only sat in front of the TV drooling for, like, 3 hours. So I'm ok.

But, I digress.

In addition to *approximately* quartering the recipe (which included some odd measurements, like 0.375 cups...) I substituted brown sugar for white (again, using what I had in the cabinet). There may be some conversion tables to do this correctly, but I just kept the amounts the same. That, in conjunction with what I did next, is probably what made them gray.

Next, I raided the fridge. The Brew Meister had made some peach jam little while back, so I polished that off into the batter. He also took a business trip to Boise last week and thoughtfully brought home a small jar of huckleberry jam for us, so a spoonful went into the batter, too. That's probably the color culprit. In the photos, the cupcakes don't appear very gray, but trust me: they are. In fact, if I didn't have a mouthful of sweet teeth and a sugar craving the size of Russia, I might not even eat them (Disclaimer: that's probably not true.)

Because I added extra wet ingredients (2 flavors of jam), and didn't amp up the dry ingredients in return, and because my measurements may have been slightly significantly off, the cupcakes were a little gummy. The Brew Meister suggested "icing" them with some more of the huckleberry jam, which was a great suggestion.

The whole process of deciding to make cupcakes, finding a recipe, gathering ingredients, doing my math, and making the actual batter seemed to be an out-of-body experience. Clearly, whatever part of my brain that responds to sugar was leading the way here. Since that was the case, I didn't remember to get pictures of the assembly process. So, I took a picture of my sink after the fact:

Here's a funny side effect of this blog: because I know that at least one person is reading this (thanks, Mom!) I also subconsciously act as if people are watching me in my kitchen, so I tend to clean up really well and really quickly. Trust me, (and ask the Brew Meister), this is not something I do after every meal.

Thanks for reading, and I hope your cupcakes turn out better! Maybe adding only 1 flavor of jam, or not any jam, but making a nice icing, or just not baking them and eating the batter straight out of the bowl will result in better eats. I will not say if there was any leftover batter that didn't make it into the cupcake pan with this batch (wink).