One thing I always try to do is to use up food before it goes bad. Since I had 5 eggs whites left over from the batch of ice cream I made last week I just "had" to make cupcakes. Purely for frugal purposes you understand.
My very nice mother bought me Martha Stewart's cupcake book a month ago. I of course, opened it up and immediately wanted to bake and inhale all of the recipes. Not being blessed with Michael Phelp's metabolism (apparently he has to eat the equivalent of 20 Big Mac combos to keep from losing weight), I decided to bide my time. Since the recipe requires egg whites and I had some on hand I thought it was the perfect opportunity.
I am lucky in that I have central air conditioning so I get to bake the whole summer long. This always elicits weird looks from my co-workers when they find out I made lasagna when it is 35 degrees Celsius outside.
I used Martha Stewart's recipe for chocolate chip cupcakes, minus the chocolate chips. There is not a lot of butter and the batter has whipped egg whites folded in so the cupcakes are extremely light and fluffy.
I did have a problem however, when it came to the icing. I was out of cocoa powder and baking chocolate, oops. Not to be deterred (and I was going to be extremely cranky if I did not get chocolate icing), I decided to invent an icing recipe. I beat together a small amount of butter, some icing sugar, chocolate chips that I melted in the microwave and when all of that was mixed, a few tablespoons of boiling water. The delicious results can be seen above. For the good of my waistline I have had to freeze most of the batch. I should freeze the icing as well because if I have a bad day at work I might be tempted to go to town and eat it all with a spoon.
