Hummingbird Bakery Lemon Cupcakes, High-Altitude Style

For those of you who have been following my blog closely, you might notice that this post deviates a little bit from my standard format. With the last three recipes — that is, the vanilla, chocolate, and red velvet cupcakes — I started out with baking the original, unaltered sea-level recipe to see how it would fare at high-altitude.

However, I’ve been reading Christina Tosi’s Milk Bar cookbook these last few days, which gave me some new ideas on how to approach my high-altitude experimenting procedures. In the book’s introduction, Tosi discusses the concept of the “mother sauce” in French cooking. According to Tosi, there are only four mother sauces in French cooking. Almost every other French sauce is a derivative of one of these four sauces — if you master each of these sauces, you can make nearly anything in French cuisine. She structures each recipe in her cookbook to include “mother recipes”; almost every other recipe in the book is a variation of one of these recipes.

Flipping through The Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook, I began to notice that same mother recipe concept in play. Strawberry cheesecake cupcakes had a recipe almost identical to vanilla cupcakes, except for the addition of some strawberries. The recipe for chocolate hazelnut frosting is identical to the recipe for chocolate buttercream frosting, except with Nutella substituting for cocoa powder.

Similarly, a comparison between the Hummingbird Bakery’s recipe for lemon cupcakes with its recipe for vanilla cupcakes revealed striking similarities — that is, the recipe for lemon cupcakes was simply the recipe for vanilla cupcakes, but minus vanilla extract and instead the addition of some lemon zest:

Maybe the Hummingbird vanilla recipe was the “mother recipe” for its lemon cupcakes recipe?