Great-fruit cupcakes

Last weekend I ventured into the realm of from-scratch GF baking. I set a lofty goal of making grapefruit cupcakes, which I had never made (or eaten) before. To complicate things, I couldn't find a recipe for GF grapefruit cupcakes, so I was left to adapt a normal recipe.

I ventured to an Asian store (the flours found there are supposed to be cheaper than they are in the healthfood section of grocery stores). A note about these flours: they're much finer than the ones in the grocery store, so you can't really use equal substitutions. I'll experiment with that later and let you know my thoughts. The superfine rice flour I bought was $1 per bag; the tapioca starch was $0.75. Score! Another side note: tapioca starch and tapioca flour are the same thing. (This is not true with potato starch/flour and corn starch/flour.)

I ventured to the grocery store in to buy the rest of the ingredients for my flour mixture (recipe to follow), as well as some other flours. Only when I got home did I realize that one flour recipe called for tapioca starch or corn starch, so I assumed that they were interchangeable. But my flour recipe called for both. I debated going back to get potato starch but decided that because they were interchangeable in one recipe, using only corn starch would probably suffice. So I added corn starch for both amounts. I'll eventually try to recreate the cupcakes with the proper starches in the flour and let you know if I notice a difference.
After I mixed up my flour, I moved on to mixing up the cupcakes. I mixed the dry ingredients and formed a well, to which I added the wet ingredients (minus the egg whites) and a few drops of red food coloring. I wanted my grapefruit cupcakes to look ruby-red.

The batter looked like pink bubble gum.

I was very surprised as I started mixing – this batter was like no batter I had ever seen before. It looked like I was mixing a large bowl of bubble gum. I'm assuming that the small amount of xanthan gum in the flour mixture is what caused the batter to gum-up. I'm also going to try baking these again without this recipe, just to see how they turn out.
I put the gummy-concoction into the cupcake papers in my pan, put it in the oven, and hoped that the cupcakes would turn out better than I was expecting.



I took then out of the oven and was impressed. They looked like cupcakes! The strange thing, though, was that seconds after I took them out of the oven, they started to shrink. The cupcake papers pulled away from the side and the tops sunk down instead of staying rounded. Strange.

Normal looking cupcakes.

Shriveled cupcakes.

I set them aside to cool and worked on the icing. I decided to go for cream cheese icing, but also add a little grapefruit flavor. I remembered the butter this time, but it still didn't turn out quite right. Next time I'm going to let the butter soften and use a sifter for the powdered sugar.

I nervously decided to try my creation. I love it when I surprise myself! They were GREAT! They didn't have a gummy or spongey texture at all, and they weren't dry or gritty! They were light and had a great citrusy flavor. I will be making these again. I brought them in for my coworkers and they gave the recipe rave reviews – even those who don't like grapefruit.