Cupcaking and scale fail

Today I used my friend Chrissy's carrot cake recipe - linked from here as 'Carrot cake large', which downloads as a word document - to make cupcakes. It makes 48, in case anyone was wondering. The recipe can be halved or quartered, but I needed that many cakes!

It made me miss Chrissy. She and I worked more events together than I can count, ran a bakery together at the Big Green Gathering one year, and worked together on the school dinner project. (I still have nightmares about the WISP nutritional analysis software, but the food prep bit was fun)

I also realised very quickly that I am out of the habit of doing an inventory before I start - meaning I'm low on nice sugar (you'll see the really aggravating bit about that in a minute!) and sunflower oil. Nevermind. I have plenty of cake and that's a good thing.

The most annoying, aggravating, want-to-throw-the-whole-lot-through-a-window bit of the process involved the needle getting stuck on my rather cheap and crappy scales. (It's only quite recently that I've owned scales, and I rarely use them even now, so these will usually do) I put in waaaay more sugar than intended and had to scoop some out and segregate it from the main supply - no way to I want to risk getting flour in my tea! I probably didn't get quite enough out, sorry if you're at the potluck tomorrow and go home with toothache. Blame the scales...

What the cupcakes have in sugar, they lack in structural integrity - several have disintegrated in the process of getting them out of the tray. Of course I HAVE to eat those ones rather than inflicting them on anyone else!

A quick note: the recipe is for a large cake cooked in an ex-army mess tin, so the listed baking time is loooong. Cupcakes will be incinerated if left for that long - I think mine got 25-30 minutes. Maybe a few minutes longer would have stopped them falling apart, but they certainly don't need an hour.