Gluten Free Strawberry Cupcake Fail

Because I had so many strawberries on hand this week, I decided to try out this strawberry cupcake recipe from Sprinkles Cupcakes.

http://www.marthastewart.com

I also wanted to see if I could make them gluten free and try out some of the alternative flours that I've heard work well in baked goods. I chose to use the Gluten Free All-Purpose Baking Flour from Bob's Red Mill, which is a mix of garbonzo flour, potato starch, tapioca flour, sorghum flour, and fava flour.

Things were going well, and I was having fun pureeing strawberries and measuring quantities and other baking stuff. I combined everything, dipped my finger into the mixture for a taste, and wasn't very happy with the result. It'll get better when it cooks, I told myself.

Well, not really. I think I definitely could have been more precise with my measurements of flour, and I know I added too much vanilla. The cupcakes came out tasting...good, but not like cupcakes. And certainly not like something I'd bring in to surprise my lacrosse team, which had been my intention.

Then I tried to make a strawberry glaze to salvage the cupcakes. Now, it should be known that I consider myself something of a glaze master, considering the fact that I spent two good years of my youth making "lemon sugar" with a friend of mine, a task that required us stealing the lemons her mother had bought, squeezing the juice into a bowl, and mixing it with powdered sugar until the mixture thickened. We would sneak up to her room and eat it by the spoonful. If that wasn't a sign of food obsession to come, I don't know what was.

In any case, I hated the way the strawberry glaze turned out. Glazes require a lot of powdered sugar in order to thicken, and I guess my palate has changed and tolerates less sweetness now.

All in all, I call this a Kitchen Fail. That doesn't mean that my roommate and I didn't eat a few of the cupcakes, but they definitely weren't as good as I had envisioned. For the most part, I kept eating them to try to figure out what went wrong in terms of taste. Maybe too much salt. Oh well...off to try out gluten free banana bread next. Fingers crossed!

Administrative side note: I'm going out to California for the next few days to interview for a job that I want more than I've been craving a slice of pizza for the last three months (that's just so, so I won't be posting much. Apologies in advance, and think good thoughts! much)