I had the day off, so of course that meant cupcake baking :) Nordstrom is currently having its annual Anniversary Sale, where its fall product comes in on sale and then goes back to full price at the end of the month. As you can imagine, it's been pretty busy and everyone's been working super hard so I wanted to bake something for the girls in my department.
I decided on
vanilla bean cupcakes with vanilla buttercream frosting, and did the frosting in the colors of the Anniversary Sale logo.
The recipe called for a real vanilla bean, and they are probably the strangest thing I've ever baked with. When you eat vanilla ice cream vanilla beans are what cause the little black flecks in it. Incase you want to make these yourself, look for something packaged like this in the grocery store:
It took ten minutes of wandering around Giant with a lost look on my face before the store manager eventually came over and helped me find them haha. This is what's inside:
So weird. Anyways, the cupcakes turned out okay, the batter was super thick and I prefer thicker batters to runny ones but I'm not in love with this cupcake.
I ate three, of course, and in two of them I could definitely taste the salt, I'm not sure if I didn't mix the batter enough or added too much salt by accident, so if I make these again I'll either skip the salt or add an even smaller amount.
The colors in the frosting didn't turn out as I wanted them to, but since I had to split the frosting into four different bowls I was hesitant about adding more food coloring because if there's too much you can taste it in the frosting. Below you can see the colors I was attempting to imitate and clearly did not create but I tried :)
Overall, I wouldn't make this cupcake again because I'm not a huge vanilla fan but here are the recipes incase you want to try them!
