Recipe Tuesday :: Peach Cupcake Fail

Peach cupcakes are the epitome of summer time.  I can envision what the flavor would be; light, sweet, fresh and peachy.  Sadly my peach cupcakes were...bland.  They tasted like Cake with Frosting on top.  Not one flavor distinguished them as peach.  This was one time where Pinterest images had you believing one thing while you cooked up flavorless cupcakes instead.  I mean look at this picture of peach perfection!

Peach Cupcakes with Peach Cream Cheese Frosting

Not true I tell you.  I admit to some blending and tweaking of the recipes I used, but I don't think it's what failed them.  I think the secret ingredient to fix these cupcakes is peach extract.  Nice and concentrated it would put that pop of peach right into those cupcakes.  So if you want to have a go at either of the following recipes my suggestion is to get some extract to make them taste as good as they look.

The main recipe I used was  Peach Cupcakes with Peach Cream Cheese Frosting by Week of Menus.
She wanted you to pulverize freeze dried peaches and peach puree to the batter to get that peach flavor and then add more dried peaches to the frosting.  I did buy some freeze dried peaches, but when I opened them I thought they smelled kinda nasty.  Dried fruits don't always smell like the fresh ones they come from, so I gave them a taste but they didn't taste very peachy.  With two counts against them I omitted the dried peaches.  Using an additional recipe with a different frosting I tweaked the main one.  Peach Cupcakes with Peach Buttercream by Caithlin Cooks used a whole cup of pureed fresh peach.  I upped the peach puree in the main recipe and then also swapped out the 1 cup of butter for 1/2 cup oil and 1/4 cup peach nectar.  I was hoping the peach nectar would add more peachy flavor.  I also lowered the buttermilk to 1/2 cup to keep all the "wet" ingredients to the same amount before tweaking.  My poorest tweak was probably the addition of 1/2 tsp cinnamon.  I just felt there was going to be NO flavor if I didn't add just a little bit of spice.  This ended up making the cupcakes just taste like spice cake.

I topped them with the cream cheese frosting, swapping peach puree for the pulverized dried peaches.  Peach puree doesn't have much flavor to it unfortunately.  Maybe some addition of sugar would have made it tastier?  One will never know (unless you feel like experimenting).  It just ended up being peach colored cream cheese frosting.  The color I am VERY proud of however!  I used liquid food coloring, like you get at the grocery store, in a ratio of 3 drops yellow to 1 drop red.  I kept adding color in this ratio (probably 3 rounds worth) to get that deep permeating lovely peach color.

I hate failures but I admit them fully so that this blog doesn't end up looking like I only do things well and in a perfect world.  I also take any failure as a challenge to improve, so maybe next summer, armed with peach extract, I shall try again!