Fancy Eid Vanilla Bean Cupcakes
“I can’t believe Ramadan is almost over!” said every Muslim at the end of every Ramadan.
Naturally, as I say goodbye to my favorite month of the year, I begin thinking about my plans to celebrate Eid. Since high school, I’ve been baking some type of dessert every Eid. The past 2 or 3 years, though, I haven’t. Here’s to changing that!
I’ve got an easy recipe for you all—vanilla bean cupcakes without the headache of getting wimpy imitation vanilla extract. SLO Food Group has ethically sourced vanilla beans and they’re quite affordable! Cheaper than the ones at Sprouts, that’s for sure.
Ingredients
1/2 cup butter, softened
1/2 cup sugar
1 egg
3/4 cup flour, sifted
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
3/4 cup milk
1 tbsp yogurt
Recipe (serves 6-8)
In a large bowl or a stand mixer, beat the softened butter until it’s “whippy.”
Add half of the sugar and whisk until incorporated. Scrape down the sides of the bowl with a spatula, then add the rest of the sugar.
When completely mixed, add the egg and whisk until you see no more lumps.
Next you will add the dry and wet ingredients alternatively, always starting and ending with the dry ingredients. So in this case, add half of the flour and the baking powder.
Mix, mix, mix! Gently, though, don’t beat too much air into it.
Then add a mixture of the milk, yogurt, and vanilla beans. Mix this slowly so you don’t spatter liquid everywhere!
Add the remaining flour and beat until just incorporated. The batter will be somewhat thick but still sludgy.
Line a cupcake pan with cupcake liners. Using an ice cream scoop (1/4 cup), fill up each liner.
Pop into an oven preheated to 325°F and bake for about 20 minutes. Starting at 16 minutes into the baking, you can start checking the done-ness of the cupcakes by gently stabbing (ha!) the center of one of the cupcakes. If it comes out clean or with dry/moist crumbs (not wet batter), then you’re done! Take them out and let them cool a little bit in the pan before transferring to a cooling rack to pipe. If the toothpick comes out with some wet batter, continue baking for 2 minutes and check again. Repeat until the toothpick comes out clean!
Tips
Unlike what I did in my video, I recommend mixing the vanilla beans into the liquid (in this case, milk and yogurt) so that they will more evenly disperse throughout the batter. You don’t want chunks of vanilla bean in your cupcake.
Don’t take the cupcakes out of the pan immediately after baking, otherwise you’ll smush them. These cupcakes are quite moist, and you don’t want to ruin their shape while they’re still hot/not quite set.
For these vanilla bean cupcakes, I recommend a frosting light in both texture and flavor. I used a simple, very basic buttercream for mine!
To really make these cupcakes scream EID, place some flakes of gold foil from SLO Food Group on top!