To choose the best ingredients for cupcakes, look for quality products. For example, real lemon peel and juice can create genuine-tasting lemony cupcakes, while lemon-flavored artificial ingredients are likely to taste less realistic. Avoid ingredients with sugar and excess additives such as sweetened cocoa, as the flavor tends to be less rich. It's better to add your own sugar so you can control the amount of sweetness as well as the quality of the sweetener. As cupcakes should typically be light and fluffy in texture, using white flour and sugar is usually better than whole wheat flour and brown sugar.
An exception to white sugar or flour being better is when making chocolate cupcakes. Brown sugar, with its high molasses content, can add a pleasant richness to the chocolate. The denseness and nutty quality can suit chocolate cupcakes well, but are much too textured for most other varieties. Cocoa ingredients for cupcakes are best in unsweetened varieties that can be made as sweet as you'd like with brown sugar. If you're using chocolate chips in addition to or instead of cocoa powder, the premium quality of semisweet chips can be an excellent choice.
Good quality dark chocolate chips may also double as cupcake decorations to place on top of the frosting. Unsweetened cocoa can be ideal for making a butter cream chocolate frosting, as it's simple to gradually stir it into the icing sugar and butter until the desired flavor is reached. For the best frosting ingredients for cupcakes, real butter along with full-fat milk or light or heavy cream should be used to create rich chocolate or other icing flavors.
Scraping a vanilla bean into white frosting and cupcake batter can result in intense, delicious flavor. If you don't want the appearance of little dark flecks in your cupcakes, you could opt to use pure vanilla extract instead. This type is more expensive than extracts with artificial flavors and fillers added, yet you can typically use less since it is pure, not diluted, vanilla. For lemon or orange flavors, real fruit with both its juice and zest, or grated peel, makes the best cupcake ingredients to add a genuine, refreshing citrus appeal.
Be sure your cupcake ingredients are fresh. Rancid flour isn't going to make any flavor of cupcake taste its best. Fresh eggs should be used in the cupcake batter, and fresh milk or cream, rather than soured varieties, should be your choice for icings. To choose the best ingredients for cupcakes, always keep track of the expiration dates of your baking products.