Uniform portion is key to cute little cakes

Hai mina-sama!!! As the title suggest, uniform portion is key to cute little cakes. That means cupcake batter that have been divided evenly into the paper cups makes very attractive presentation. However it is impossible to achieve even proportion with just a normal dinner spoon unless we measure the weight of the batter that goes in each paper cup. So, how can we achieve uniform portion each time? Allow me to use this photo below to answer that question:

Yes, it's an ice-cream scoop! But not just a regular ice-cream scoop, it's a scoop with the quick release spring. So, this simple mechanism here ensures that we get even portion of the batter and the quick release spring makes scraping down the batter into the paper cup so easy. I can't take credit for this awesome idea of course. I read about it from Martha Stewart's Cupcakes book. The book is great but to me the idea of the ice-cream scoop is just brilliant.

The first time I used the scoop, I was just so amaze how much time I was able to save in spooning the batter into the paper cups. I used to use 2 dinner spoons, 1 spoon to spoon the batter and the other one to scrap the batter from spoon into paper cup. It took me 15 to 20 minutes to fill 6 paper cups. With the ice-cream scoop, I'm done in 5 minutes or less. And look at how evenly proportioned my cupcakes turned out:

Get one and try it for yourself. Be aware that the scoop comes in different sizes. So get the size that fits the paper cups you usually used. I got one in size 20, it's about 5.5cm in diameter and it fills the regular baking cups perfectly i.e three-quarters full of the cup. It makes baking little cakes so much easier and fun!

Happy Baking!!