I was especially excited to adapt this recipe for high altitude because I love bananas. I’m pretty sure I eat one everyday.
- 1 cup all-purpose flour
- a scant 3/4 cup sugar
- 1 tablespoon baking powder
- 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
- 1 teaspoon ground ginger
- a pinch of salt
- 5 tablespoons unsalted butter, at room temperature
- 1/2 cup whole milk
- 2 eggs
- 1 ripe banana, peeled and mashed
For instance, the Banana and Chocolate Cupcakes recipe only calls for 1 tablespoon of baking powder as opposed to the Vanilla Cupcakes recipe, which requires 1 1/2 at sea-level. According to the Hummingbird Bakery Blog, the sponge for this recipe is much denser and richer than the bakery’s other sponges, calling for less leavener to achieve such an effect. Less leavener might actually work to my advantage, since baking powder/baking soda tends to have more powerful effects at high-altitude due to lower atmospheric pressure.
Other things that might work to my advantage: more fat in the cupcake recipe (this recipe calls for 5 tablespoons of butter, as opposed to the Vanilla Cupcakes recipe’s 3), as well as the recipe’s generous use of flavoring agents (2 teaspoons worth of different spices, along with 1 whole mashed banana). All these things combine to create a heavier, sturdier batter that won’t just dissolve into a puddle of goop like lighter batters tend to do at high altitudes.
The last thing that I found interesting about the recipe was its use of 2 eggs for the batter, as opposed to previous Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook recipes, which only use 1 egg. According to Pie In The Sky: Successful Baking at High Altitudes, a common quick-fix remedy for adapting recipes to work at high altitudes is to add an extra egg. This works because many high altitude recipes need extra liquid (to prevent them from drying out) and more protein (which adds strength to the batter). So again, this additional egg seems like it’s to my advantage.
So, thinking I had a fairly decent shot of this recipe without too many adjustments, I rolled up my sleeves and decided to just bake the sea-level recipe without any changes or adjustments.
And how did it fare at high-altitude?
Not bad. Not bad at all.
As I was expecting, the batter’s weight held the cupcakes together fairly well — no puddles of goop this time around! If anything, the cupcakes actually looked too sunken in, indicating that I need to use more leavening agent:
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According to the Hummingbird Bakery Blog, sunken Banana and Chocolate cupcakes are a common problem:
Interesting.
It seems like all I really need to do is adjust the recipe’s temperature and bake time. Again, this isn’t really that surprising, since almost all of the Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook’s recipes have needed some form of temperature adjustment for high-altitude. Recall that, at higher altitudes, water evaporates at a lower temperature, so you need more heat/longer cooking times when baking.
Alrighty then. Stay tuned for the next post — temperature adjustments!
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