KikaEats: Learning Butter Lane's Cupcake Secrets

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Learning Butter Lane's Cupcake Secrets

Moo. A sweet cure for the January blues.

Now I love Butter Lane even more. Arguably makers of the best cupcakes in the EV, possibly in the city, the bakery actually teaches you its trade secrets at cupcake class.

The teaching kitchen adjacent to the store

The wildly popular classes are now offered seven days a week. I took one on a recent Sunday afternoon with two friends. Head baker and pastry chef Sunshine Flagg (wd~50, Momofuku Noodle Bar) took 12 of us through two entertaining hours of hands-on instruction. Three teams, three kinds of cupcakes (vanilla, chocolate, banana), six different frostings. Zero calorie counting.

High quality cakes start with fine ingredients. So the vanilla batter includes real vanilla bean. And thanks to Sunshine, we all now know the real origin of vanilla. It's not Tahiti or Madagascar. We also know to never overmix the batter, or undermix the frosting.

My final product - not perfect, but perfectly delicious

Ahh, the frosting. A basic buttercream, delicious in its simplicity, can easily be transformed by just one more ingredient. Will it be cinnamon, or peanut butter, or raspberry?

Once the cakes were cooled and creams whipped, we got a brief instruction on the Butter Lane method of frosting. The pat, twirl and whoosh technique is not as easy as it looks. There is a class prize for the best Butter Lane-esque cake, so channel that inner decorator. Regardless, everyone walked away with a box of personally decorated, perfectly scrumptious cupcakes.

Butter Lane clearly has fun with its classes. Look out for couples only classes on Fridays, frosting 101, and basic cake decorating. There are even private parties for birthdays, showers and other celebrations. On March 12th, it's launching a Cupcakes and Cocktails class. Sweet oblivion.