The Lazy Delight of Burnt Butter Cupcakes

Usually, when I feel like baking, I don't have the slightest problem hopping in my car and buzzing off to the nearest grocery store. But last week, I was tired and it was cold outside and I didn't want to spend any money and, gosh darnit, I was feeling whiny and there was nothing in the world that would set me right but an easy, no-hassle, delicious cupcake.

Luckily, Nigella Lawson came to my rescue with her Burnt Butter Cupcakes from How to Be a Domestic Goddess. Every ingredient in the recipe was already lurking somewhere in my fridge or pantry, so I didn't have to do anything but hike up my sweatpants and bake. I call that a pajama WIN!

The completed Burnt Butter Cupcakes

These sound pretty strange--how often, really, do recipes call for purposefully burning something? But I was intrigued because of an article I read in Vogue last summer. Jeffrey Steingarten, Vogue's regular food critic, wrote an article about the wonders of brown butter and how, if done properly, it can add a rich, nutty, smokey flavor to almost any savory or sweet dish. 

So what does burnt butter taste like, exactly?

Toffee. That's it. I'll admit that I was surprised by this when I first sampled the batter, but then I had a total *duh* moment: what else is toffee but burnt butter and sugar? Of course these would taste like vanilla toffee!

The very first step of the recipe, burning the butter, was its most nerve-wracking part. Burning butter just doesn't seem like a wise thing to do. What if I burn my butter beyond repair?, I worried. What if my burnt butter tastes terrible because, well, it's burnt, even if Nigella's tastes mind-bendingly good?

But the process was actually quite simple, and it was easy to tell when the butter was properly burnt. (I couldn't take a picture of this, however, since the butter was too foamy to tell that its oil was turning brown!)

The unsalted butter melting over medium heat.

The butter bubbling and foaming mid-way through its burning.

The finished burnt butter, with the sediment strained out on a piece of cheesecloth.

As always, Lawson's recipe was very easy to follow. My only hiccup was that, even after thirty minutes of sitting out/in the fridge, my burnt butter would not solidify like it was supposed to. So I just threw it in my batter as a liquid, and it didn't seem to do any harm. In fact, it possibly improved the airiness of the cupcakes' texture!

The mixed batter.

The recipe produced very few cakes (only eleven very tall cups), and they baked very quickly, so the most time-consuming part of this recipe was prepping the butter. The cakes turned out to have a fine, tender crumb and to be light golden in color. They reminded me of cornbread, only sweeter and without that unpleasant density and dryness common to most cornbreads.

The high domes on the baked cakes.

 

If you look closely, you can see the fine crumb.

The frosting was the only thing I didn't like about this recipe. It was far too sweet for me, and a little heavy, to boot. After the light, sweet, mellow burnt buttery-ness of the cupcakes, I didn't enjoy how sweet the frosting was or how strongly it tasted of burnt butter (you burn even more butter for the frosting recipe!). It was kind of like eating caramel frosting --ack!!! *cough, hack, pitooey*--only grainier. I would have much rather topped these with a puffy whipped cream frosting or some mild cream cheese frosting.

The super-sweet, super-smoky frosting.

However, others disagreed with me. My mom liked the frosting as-is, but thought it was very rich, and Charlie downright loved the frosting. I think my dad was fond of it, too.

Aren't these purdy?

At the end of the night, happily stuffed with buttery, toffee-flavored, crumbly-rich goodness, I would definitely recommend these burnt butter treats to anyone. These were easy-to-make, but they possessed a certain sophisticated je ne sais quoi after a lifetime of boring old white cake recipes. So go ahead: burn it, baby!