Blueberry Thyme Cupcakes with Honey Buttercream
I know what you're thinking, "two food posts in one week? How did I, the reader, find myself in such fortuitous circumstances?" Well, don't get used to it is all I can tell you. I happened to have a Sunday free, okay?
Sundays though, are the greatest days for domesticity. They're the day to spend tinkering with recipes in the kitchen, wearing a white Hanes undershirt and not caring how stained it gets. Rolling up those metaphorical sleeves, watching whatever's on the Food Network, and feeling no pressure to perform.
It's a good thing I wasn't holding myself to any standards in the kitchen on this lazy Sunday because today's culinary successes were recycled failures. I started out with a recipe for French macarons. I had never made them before and I know they can go one way or very much another. Let's just say mine went their own way, a la Fleetwood Mac. Maybe it was because I added honey, maybe it was because I (blasphemously) liked that pan with Pam instead of using parchment paper, maybe it was too humid, maybe macarons don't like Giada At Home going on in the background whilst attempting macaronage, which is a real term by the way, the more you know.
Either way, they came out like this:
While they were in the oven slowly conspiring for their own demise, I had naively made the buttercream filling. 18 minutes and endless heartbreaks later, I had some sort of lattice egg white cookie thing that actually tasted fantastically savory, light, and sweet...and about 2 pounds of honey buttercream.
I decided it was time to throw in the towel but couldn't bring myself to waste all of those misfit ingredients. It seemed too hypocritical, seeing as just this week I forced my family into composting against their will. The general theory is that it will smell like rotting food and I'm just like, "family. That's already happening by the ton in landfills. Cello, we're decreasing methane gas here and that smells damn good to me."
So I resolve to reduce, reuse, recycle in the only way I know how. Cupcakes. I took the same flavor profile and worked it into those gloriously simple miniature cakes of the cup variety. I started with a basic vanilla cake recipe, and swapped out half of the white sugar for honey, then added in finely chopped fresh thyme and halved blueberries. Halving them is a great trick because it keeps them from becoming random rocks in the soil of the cupcake, allowing them to incorporate their flavor and texture into the cake in a really nice way.
Not allowing myself to be beat by diva egg whites and almond flour, I broke some of the lattice nonsenses into what became a wonderful garnish for the cupcakes. Fresh blueberries and a drizzle of honey atop the repurposed honey buttercream finished off my absolute domination by defiance of macarons in all their self-declared glory.