Heavenly Palate: [St. Patrick's Day Cupcake] Perfectly fluffy and soft treats to celebrate St. Paddy's day

As you might have easily guessed, I'm not Irish :). Still I feel like celebrating St. Paddy's day on March 17th. I went to an over-crowded Irish pub on every St. Paddy's day with Irish friends when I didn't have dependents. I gave up the idea of going to an Irish pub on St. Paddy's day since I was pregnant with Remi in 2004. Therefore, it has been already 10 years that I had a can of Guinness at home instead of a draft at an Irish pub. (Wow, how could time pass so fast????) I must say I miss the jovial atmosphere of the pub filled with gleeful crowd holding dark stout. But, I can wait for another 8 years~ :)

Yeah, we will still have two dependents in 8 years from today, but they will be fine on their own for an evening, or they may be celebrating St. Paddy's way with their friends, I expect? For now, I'm happy with baking a dozen cupcakes to celebrate St. Paddy's day with my three guys. I'll bake some more for my colleagues tonight.

I've been looking for a soft basic vanilla cupcake recipe. Believe me, I've tried more than a dozen vanilla cake recipes. I liked some of them more than others. Nevertheless, I couldn't fine "the" one recipe to use over and over. But now I think I finally found THE recipe at Cookies and Cups site.

I've made only one small modification to the original recipe: use of cold butter instead of butter at room temperature.

And, I was surprised by its ultra fluffiness and softness. I love these simple cupcakes I made! You can finish the cupcakes with any kind of frosting of your choice. I covered my cupcakes with cream cheese frosting and sprinkled with green shamrock sprinkles.

Here goes the recipe for the super soft cupcake:

(adapted from Cookies and Cups)

Ingredients

(for a dozen cupcakes. halved from the original recipe)
3/4 cup + 2 tablespoons cake flour

1/2 cup + 2 tablespoons all purpose flour

1 cup cup sugar

1 + 1/4 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp kosher salt

1/2 cup butter, cold, cut into 1/2 inch cubes

2 eggs

1/2 cup milk

1 tsp vanilla

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350°

2. Line cupcake pan with cupcake liners.

3. In bowl of food processor or blender, add the first 5 dry ingredients and stir together using paddle attachment for about a minute. Enough to get them nice and combined.

4. With mixer on low, drop in butter, a few cubes at a time continuing until all butter is in and mixer resembles coarse sand.

5. Add eggs one at a time on low speed.

6. With mixer still on low slowly pour in milk and vanilla. Turn mixer to medium and beat for 2 minutes until batter is smooth, scraping sides of bowl as needed.