Kitchen Alchemy

One of the best tips I ever got on cupcake baking was to use an icecream scoop to measure out the mix. Icecream scoop, I hear you say? One of those anti-freeze jobs that they use at the gelato bar? The kind they use to roll the icecream into a ball before they drop it into a cone or cup? Absolutely not! Once was a time when the humble icecream scoop was far less technological, and might I say successful. It was a fixed metal scoop with a moveable wire that swooped across the bowl of the scoop with a spring action to eject the icecream from the crevice. As it turns out, this is the ideal item to measure the perfect amount of cupcake batter into a standard muffin tin. When I heard this, I went out in search of a traditional icecream scoop, and found not one but two different sizes. I bought both, thinking there would indeed be a use for each; all I had to do was think one up. I got to work with my icecream scoop and found that not only could I get the cupcake batter into the cups a whole...