This is another recipe from The Butch Bakery cupcakes, which I reviewed recently on Cooks&Books&Recipes. I thought these would be really interesting, but can I be honest? I made a couple of unfortunate choices here. First – I used Zatarian’s Root Beer extract for the frosting. It’s one of the two recommended brands, and is considered the best root beer extract on the market if you ask just about any root beer home brewer. But it’s very dark brown, and after I made the buttercream I realized, looking at the photo in the book, that the authors must have used the other brand, because their frosting is almost white. So I ended up with a brown frosting, which isn’t the worst thing in the world – chocolate is brown. But then I chose the worst pastry tip available – a fat, round one that made my frosting look like a little dog came along and pooped all over my cupcakes.

Unappetizing as the frosting looks, it’s still pretty good. It’s got an interesting flavor. The cake, on the other hand, turned out a little weird tasting and kind of heavy. I was surprised, because it uses cake flour. They turned out more like a gingerbread. Larry thought the buttercream would be great on vanilla cupcakes, and I agree. But next time, I need to put more thought into the appearance of the frosting.

The last problem is the candy topping. It’s cute on top for a couple of hours, and then the sugar starts to melt and pool up on the frosting – and it made my buttercream deflate a bit. I’d recommend not adding the candy topping until just before serving.

• Root Beer Float Cupcakes (The Butch Bakery Cookbook, p. 133)