How to Cream Butter for Pumpkin Spiced Cupcakes

Video Transcript

"Hi I am Georgette Rampone with Expert Village. We are here making pumpkin spice cupcakes with vanilla bean cream cheese icing. First we are going to cream the butter. Now measuring butter is very easy because if you look at your wrapped cube of butter, the measurements are right on the butter. It tells you how many teaspoons, how many cups, one cube is a half a cup so half a cube is a quarter of a cup and it even has a third cup marking. Every manufacturer of butter has the same markings on the butter. This butter here, I have softened by putting in the microwave for about 12 seconds and that makes it exact room temperature and right consistency for baking. Looking on my package I want to use a quarter of a cup plus one tablespoon. A quarter of a cup of butter is three tablespoons so I am going to be using four tablespoons of butter. I am going to cut it right at the four tablespoon mark. Make sure to get all of that in there. To this I am going to add my white granulated sugar and that is about one and a quarter cups. To that I am adding my quarter cup of brown sugar and it is good to solidly pack your brown sugar when you measure it. Now I am going to add my spices. I have a half teaspoon each of Saigon cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice and ground cloves. Saigon cinnamon is the best cinnamon in the world. It is from Saigon and it has a much better aroma than most cinnamon does. It really pays to get a good cinnamon and a good vanilla when you are making a recipe like this. Now we are going to start on low speed because we do not want sugar flying all over us so we will put it on low to start and then gradually increase the speed as we cream our butter, sugar, and spices together. I am going to stop and give it a stir to make sure that no butter is stuck on the edges of the bowl. This just takes a minute or two. There, just the way we want it. All the sugar is moistened but not glopped together."