I decided to make Brown Sugar Pound Cupcakes With Brown Butter Glaze to send into school for my son’s birthday.  These cupcakes were easy to make – nothing wild and crazy about them at all. The glaze requires you to brown some butter before mixing the frosting up. Very easy.

So, there I am with the cupcake batter mixed and the cupcake pans out and I realize I have no cupcake liners. I ripped the pantry apart – there are none. Now, when sending cupcakes to school you’ve really got to have them in wrappers, or else you need to send in paper plates, which I didn’t have either.

I was just about to go to the store, when I remembered Martha’s cupcake show and the kooky woman from Pure who lines her cupcakes with parchment paper. Now she used a beige color, but I had a roll of just plain white for lining baking sheets. So I cut it out into squares. On the show, the Pure lady said she smooshes it into the tins with a glass. Here is what happened:

I smooshed it in with the glass and thought, wow! This is cool.

But then I took the glass out and the paper just popped out! I ended up scooping the batter onto the paper and kind of pressing it down to get it sit in the tin. It’s not really a very effective or easy method. The batter got on some of the edges of the paper and I didn’t really like how that looked.

The cupcakes baked up nicely though and the batter tasted yummy. They did take a little longer than the recipe said.

Doesn’t the paper look pretty? It does make it look more exciting than just a plain cupcake, for sure.

The next challenge was the frosting. You cannot frost these in a normal way because you can’t reach the cupcake. You do need to use a pastry bag to get the frosting into the paper.

Confession time. I could not face trying to dig out my pastry bag and tips. I do have a set …….somewhere! So instead, I used the ziploc bag with a corner cut off method.

I should have doubled the frosting recipe. The Pure woman loaded the tops of her cupcakes with frosting and to make it look pretty, you really do need a lot, so you can completely cover the top of the cupcake.

They turned out ok though I think. As for the taste test, I can’t give a lot of firsthand info. I had 24 cupcakes, which needed to feed 23 kids plus a teacher, so there wasn’t even one available to sample! The batter tasted great and so did the little crumbs I managed to find. The frosting had a great taste too. The kids ate every single one and the word is they  liked them a lot – and thought they looked exciting too.