You can top the cupcakes with whipped cream, ice cream, or any frosting you like!

Ingredients

Pound cake gets its name from the fact that it originally contained a full pound of butter. For 24 cupcakes, you’ll use three sticks – one stick shy of the full pound.

What Are Fairy Cakes?

What a fairy cake is completely depends on who you talk to.

Oatmeal cream pies are soft and chewy oatmeal cookies stuffed with a thick layer of vanilla frosting. They are some of the best sandwich cookies around, ranking right up there with Oreos!

In my homemade version, I preserve the spirit of the plastic-wrapped oatmeal cream pie but upgrade it with better ingredients.

What is It?

Vanilla bean paste is a thick syrup made using vanilla bean pod seeds and vanilla extract.

Not only will it make your desserts look pretty (see the vanilla flecks in the frosting photo below), but it will also give them an intense vanilla flavor – think of vanilla bean ice cream compared to plain vanilla ice cream.

What You’ll Need

Start with some basic cupcake baking tips if you aren’t familiar with how to bake cupcakes.

To make these cupcakes, you’ll need mini cupcake liners [paid link] and a mini muffin tin [paid link]. Mini muffin tins typically hold 24 mini cupcakes.

I’ve been making this buttercream for over ten years. It’s one of my most requested recipes.

I use this on vanilla cupcakes, chocolate cupcakes, funfetti birthday cupcakes, in cake truffles and cake pops, and even as a filling in my homemade Oreo cookies. Even though it’s considered an American buttercream, it isn’t cloyingly sweet; vanilla is by far the most prominent flavor.

While this recipe is used by bakeries all over the world, it is easy enough to make that a beginner can whip up a batch.

Along with my chocolate cupcakes, this recipe is one that I am most proud of on the site. I spent a year developing and testing it with the help of 50 test bakers.

I love historical desserts – especially those with an interesting story or those that I may never have heard of before. So, of course, I was super excited to read Jessie Sheehan’s new cookbook, The Vintage Baker [paid link]. In its pages, I discovered cottage pudding.

Why had I never come across cottage pudding before? It sure sounded like vanilla cake from the description, so what made it different?

As with any layer cake, this strawberry mousse layer cake requires more work than a basic dump cake. But unlike most layer cakes, you’ll assemble this one upside down inside of a cake pan. As a result, you don’t need to worry about the cake being crooked or lopsided.

And, because the layers are all covered on the outside by the strawberry mousse filling, you can relax a little bit about getting them completely even.

“Each of these Neapolitan cookies is like a snowflake,” says pastry chef Mathew Rice, who shares his technique and recipe with us. No two are the same.