Cream Filled Cupcakes

Birthday week. I turned seventy-two on Monday, which fell on January 19, the actual day, which only happens occasionally and which felt like a small private gift from the calendar. The grandchildren had all gone home from Christmas, the house was quiet again, and I made my own breakfast (oatmeal with maple syrup and walnuts) and drank my coffee at the kitchen table and looked at the snow on the lawn and thought: seventy-two. The number is what it is. It does not feel like seventy-two from the inside. From the inside it feels like the same Walt who was forty and seventy and twenty-five and eighteen, the same continuous person, the years not so much accumulating as folding into each other the way the layers of a phyllo dough fold without losing the original sheet.

David called at seven-thirty. Sarah called at eight. The grandchildren texted in the order I would have predicted: Anna first, then Teddy, then Ben, then Lucy, then James — James last, James always last, James the one whose phone is in his pocket and whose attention is somewhere on a screen and who genuinely loves me but who is not a morning texter. They all came through by lunchtime and the day continued like any other day, except that I made myself a small maple cream pie in the afternoon, the way Helen used to make it for me, and ate a slice with the dog watching from his chair, and read Frost's "An Old Man's Winter Night" in the evening because it is the poem I read on my birthday now, the poem about an old man alone in his house in winter, and the consolations and the not-consolations of it.

The poem ends — what kept his eyes from giving back the gaze / Was the lamp tilted near them in his hand. / What kept him from remembering what it was / That brought him to that creaking room was age. / He stood with barrels round him — at a loss. — and continues into the closing, where the moon and the broken moon and the snow upon the roof and the wind upon the snow do their work, and the old man, in his sleep, lets the stove come down and falls back into a chapter of his life. Frost, who knew Vermont and old men in equal measure, knew exactly what he was doing in that poem. I have read it for thirty winters. It does not lose anything in the rereading. The reverse, if anything.

Sarah's 8 PM call ran long that night — almost forty minutes, which is a long Sarah call. She wanted to talk through Lucy's plans for the next year, which include a stretch of work at a clinic in Costa Rica that Sarah is supportive of and apprehensive about in roughly equal measure, the way mothers are when their adventurous youngest children make plans that involve airports and Spanish-language medical paperwork. I listened mostly. When she paused I said: she'll be fine. Sarah said: you don't know that. I said: no. But she'll be fine. We left it there. The granddaughter who terrifies me by going places I have never been and would not go has my full confidence in her ability to come back, which is a confidence I did not always have but have arrived at now, partly because she has come back from everywhere she has ever gone, and partly because at seventy-two a man begins to understand that the people he loves are going to live their lives and that the only useful thing he can do about it is to not be afraid out loud.

Helen’s maple cream pie was the right thing for the day, and I made it the way she would have — unhurried, without a recipe card, the way you make something you have watched someone else make for forty years. But I want to share something a little more approachable here, something with that same spirit of quiet self-celebration: a cream filled cupcake, rich and soft, the kind of thing you make on a Tuesday afternoon in January because you are seventy-two and you have earned it and the dog is watching from his chair and no further justification is required.

Prep Time: 25 min | Cook Time: 20 min | Total Time: 45 min | Servings: 12

Ingredients

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup granulated sugar
1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup water
1/3 cup vegetable oil
1 tablespoon white vinegar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Cream Filling:
4 oz cream cheese, softened
1 1/2 cups powdered sugar, sifted
3 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2–3 tablespoons heavy cream
Chocolate Glaze:
1/2 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips
3 tablespoons unsalted butter

Instructions

Preheat and prepare. Heat your oven to 350°F. Line a standard 12-cup muffin tin with paper liners and set aside.
Mix the dry ingredients. In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, sugar, cocoa powder, baking soda, and salt until evenly combined.
Add the wet ingredients. Add the water, vegetable oil, vinegar, and vanilla extract directly to the dry ingredients. Stir until a smooth batter forms — do not overmix.
Fill and bake. Divide the batter evenly among the lined cups, filling each about 2/3 full. Bake for 18–20 minutes, until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Let cool completely on a wire rack before filling.
Make the cream filling. Beat the softened cream cheese and butter together until smooth and fluffy. Add the powdered sugar gradually, then the vanilla and enough heavy cream to reach a thick but pipeable consistency.
Fill the cupcakes. Using a small paring knife or a cupcake corer, remove a small cone from the center of each cooled cupcake. Spoon or pipe the cream filling into each cavity. Replace the top of the cone, trimming it flat if needed.
Make the glaze. Melt the chocolate chips and butter together in a small saucepan over low heat, stirring until smooth. Remove from heat and let cool for 3–4 minutes until slightly thickened.
Glaze and set. Spoon a generous teaspoon of warm glaze over the top of each filled cupcake, spreading gently to the edges. Allow to set at room temperature for 15 minutes before serving.

Nutrition (per serving)

Cream Filled Cupcakes — The Kind of Sweet That Needs No Occasion