Cupcake video recipes on your Android device

Overview

The title of this post has an intentional rhyme in it, but that’s not a hint that I’ll start rapping app reviews from now on. I bought a giraffe-toy about a year ago for my toddler and whenever you squeezed its leg (the toys’ leg that is) it started singing:

“Patty cake, patty cake, baker’s man; Bake me a cake as fast as you can; Roll it up, roll it up; Put it in a pan; And toss it in the oven as fast as you can!”

This is a variant of a very old and popular English nursery rhyme, the first appearance occurring sometime in the 17th century. Not being from the UK/US or Australia, I didn’t really understand what ‘patty cake’ is rather than some sort of cake. A search on Google Images didn’t help either (apparently there’s an actress for adult movies nicknamed that way), but I found out it actually is the Australian version of the popular ‘cupcake’.

Cupcakes are literally cup-sized cakes. The recipe for a cupcake is similar to that of any other layered cake, where basically you mix in various proportions butter, sugar, eggs, flour and add in the end the frosting (icing). Since I’m not an expert I don’t know why they didn’t just call it small cake, but to add to the confusion there’s also ‘muffins’ that are pretty much cupcakes just without frosting. Cupcake/patty-cake/muffin, whatever the name, I was finally able to explain to my son what that is and we actually bake these several times a month.

If you’re a fan of the show ‘2 Broke Girls’ you know that Max’s cupcakes are the best (and I’m talking actually about the cupcakes she makes) so why not start making them yourself as they’re not difficult to do? All you need, beside time and the ingredients, a list of recipes. Developed by FJ Marketing, ‘Cupcake Recipes’ is an app for Android devices that gathers together hundreds of videos with visual cupcake recipes.

The app

It’s free to install and as with previous apps from the same developer, ‘Cupcake Recipes’ has an initial index where you can access various recipe types and instructions. Each of the recipes is split in several YouTube embedded videos that span over 3 pages in average. What I like about video recipes is the fact that you can see the transformation from raw materials to finished product, yummy result in this case as you can see in the selected video below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqX7RWLcrPI

Features

Here are the main features of ‘Cupcake Recipes’:

Free (ad-supported). Each tutorial page has several videos that you can play and watch how those particular cupcakes are being made. Alongside those videos there are ads shown, though they’re not within the video itself thus don’t bother.
The app’s Index listing of the main categories.
75 different cupcake recipes. When the app first starts you see an Index of all the recipe categories that you have access to: Basic Cupcakes (that includes tutorials on ‘The Basic Making Of Cupcakes’, ‘Cupcakes Toppers’, ‘Decoration and Buttercream Frosting’), Cupcake Frosting (tutorials on techniques, recipes, tips, tutorial, swirl/rose/flower frosting), Theme Cupcakes (the themed cupcakes include tutorials for Angry Bird cupcakes, spongebob, princess, barbie, dora, spiderman and 24 others) and finally Types Of Cupcakes (the most extensive category, with vanilla cupcakes, chocolate, chocolate raspberry, strawberry and other 31 recipes).
One of the categories of the app with its recipes.
Hundreds of videos. For each of the recipes mentioned above (75 in total) there are 2-3 pages with video recipes on them. Thus if you do the math there are well over 150 video recipes in this app that teach you how to make cupcakes. It’s very easy to access the video tutorials, however it’s obvious that you need an internet connection to view them as they’re directly embedded from YouTube.
Actual video recipes for a listing.