How to Mix Dry Ingredients for Pumpkin Spiced Cupcakes

Video Transcript

"Hi I am Georgette Rampone with Expert Village. Today we are making pumpkin spice cupcakes with vanilla bean cream cheese icing. We are going to start by mixing the dry ingredients. We will start off by using all purpose flour. I like to sift my flour before I even measure it. If you do not sift it first, you will have an inaccurate measurement. Usually the flour gets compacted and you can see it when it has been sitting in the bag so it is always nice to just sift it in a big sifter over a bowl and then measure. There we go. Now my flour is nice and light. I am going to be measure 1 and 3/4 cup and the way I measure is by just scooping into the measuring cup. You want it to be level because if you have more flour your cupcake will be dry so this gives you an accurate measurement. Baking is really a science it makes a big difference if you have a teaspoon extra of flour or any other ingredient or to lessen one ingredient or too little of one ingredient. I am also going to put another 3/4 cup of flour in here so it is a total of 1 and 3/4 cup of flour. Now since I do not have a 3/4 cup measuring I am just going to eyeball it and that is 3/4 of a cup. As you can see there is quite a bit left over here. I originally scooped up 2 cups of flour from the sack and there is probably another cup left in here so had I measured it right out of the sack I would have a very dry cupcake. Let's just put the bowl aside here and add the other dry ingredients. First you are going to add one half teaspoon of baking soda and one half teaspoon of baking powder and one teaspoon of salt. We want to make sure that all of the salt, baking powder, and baking soda is really incorporated into the flour so that someone does not get just one bite of baking soda. You can imagine how horrible that could be. Now we are going to add our raisins and our walnuts and this is a little trick that we use at the bakery is to add the raisins and the walnuts instead of at the end is to add them with the flour mixture because then they get coated with a little bit of the flour mixture and it prevents them from sinking to the bottom of the cupcakes. Let's see how that is all incorporated there."