Vanilla Cupcake Recipe

This classic, easy vanilla cupcake recipe is soft and moist with a distinct vanilla flavor. No complicated ingredients and less than an hour from start to finish! Recipe includes a how-to video!

Why You’ll Love This Vanilla Cupcake Recipe

• Basic ingredients are best: a whole egg, regular all-purpose flour, all butter, and no oil. Buttermilk is as complicated as this ingredient list gets!
• Soft and moist texture with a buttery, distinct vanilla taste. A bit of brown sugar complements the vanilla amazingly and gives these cupcakes an unparalleled flavor.
• Pairs well with any frosting, like chocolate fudge frosting, strawberry frosting, salted caramel frosting, or even fruity pebbles frosting! I include a few more ideas in the recipe notes below 🧁
• Easily doubles if you need to feed a crowd! Or, make this recipe and my chocolate cupcake recipe for a little bit of both flavors.
• Carefully researched and tested. As with all of my recipes, this one went through rigorous trials and taste-testing. Scroll down for a sneak peek of the behind the scenes of one of the recipe testing sessions.

Every good baker needs a good vanilla cupcake recipe. While many people have converted my vanilla cake into cupcakes (and it works great!), I just wanted a dedicated, standalone cupcake for this space.

It took months of working to perfect this recipe, about 8 Google Doc pages full of notes, and multiple test runs past my taste-testers, but we finally nailed it. With its light, moist crumb, a buttery, vanilla-infused flavor, this vanilla cupcake recipe holds its own as one of my favorites many years later!

Today I’m re-sharing this classic with an updated frosting (the winning core recipe remains unchanged–it was perfect as written!). My favorite chocolate frosting still pairs just as nicely, but I’m changing things up with a vanilla bean buttercream today. I can’t wait to hear what you think!

Ingredients

My vanilla cupcake recipe uses all basic ingredients that you probably already have in your pantry:

• Butter. Often when making cupcakes I like to use oil for the best texture and a moist crumb. This vanilla cupcake recipe, however, was carefully crafted to be made with all butter and still be perfectly soft and moist with a light, flavorful texture!
• Sugar. We’re using both granulated and brown sugar today. The brown sugar enriches the flavor and makes the cupcakes more moist. Don’t skip it!
• Flour. I use all-purpose flour and recommend you do the same. You could substitute cake flour, but I actually don’t prefer the results (more on this below!).
• Buttermilk. Buttermilk is another key ingredient that helps makes these vanilla cupcakes tender and flavorful. If you don’t have buttermilk handy, my easy buttermilk substitute can work in a pinch, but real buttermilk is best.
• Vanilla extract. These cupcakes have a great vanilla flavor (but it’s not overpowering). We’re using a generous 1 ½ teaspoons for 12 cupcakes.

SAM’S TIP: Use room temperature ingredients! This helps your ingredients to combine properly when mixing. Ingredients of different temperatures could leave you with an unevenly mixed batter and dense cupcakes. I have a trick to quickly bring eggs to room temperature if you forget to set yours out ahead!

Remember, this is just an overview of the ingredients I used and why. For the full recipe please scroll down to the bottom of the post!

Behind the Scenes: Recipe Testing

I rigorously tested many different variations of this vanilla cupcake recipe to make sure it truly was the best it could be. Here are notes on a few of the many versions we tried. Since readers often ask me if they can make changes I thought this would be helpful for those of you interested in substituting oil or cake flour or reducing the sugar, etc.

1. Winning recipe: the softest cupcakes with best structure.They maintain their buttery flavor and soft texture well into the next day (and beyond!).
2. Oil instead of butter: I expected these cupcakes to be softer and to stay softer, but they weren’t. The flavor also wasn’t as good as the winning recipe. If you were refrigerating the cupcakes, perhaps it would be softer, but I still recommend the winning recipe.
3. Cake flour: this version had a tighter crumb and more cottony texture than the version made with all-purpose flour. It also seemed more dry than the others, which I attribute to the way the finer crumb melts on the tongue. 
4. Less sugar: using 2 tablespoons less brown sugar resulted in more domed, but also more dry cupcakes. It wasn’t worth the flavor or texture sacrifice for higher cupcake tops.
5. Reverse creaming method: these tasted good, but they sunk and had a tighter crumb. I was surprised at how well they didn’t do, honestly!

How to Make Vanilla Cupcakes

Make the Cupcake Batter

1. Cream the butter and sugars until light and fluffy. This step is critical for the best light and fluffy texture, so don’t be shy about it!
2. Stir in the egg and vanilla, making sure both are well incorporated.
3. Whisk together the dry ingredients in a separate bowl, then gradually fold in about ¼ of the dry ingredients. Do not use your mixer for this–switch to a spatula!
4. Fold in ¼ of the buttermilk until just combined.

5. Repeat this process until you’ve added all the flour and buttermilk and your batter is completely combined. Remember, be careful not to over-mix!
6. Divide the batter into your cupcake liners, filling ⅔-¾ of the way full. Do not overfill your liners, or you will have a mess on your hands. It’s better to discard any leftover batter versus trying to cram it into the liners.
7. Bake until the tops spring back when lightly touched and a toothpick in the center comes out with a few moist crumbs or clean.

SAM’S TIP: Over-mixing when adding the flour and buttermilk will cause your cupcakes to be dense and dry. You don’t want to under-mix (this is just as bad!), but do make sure you aren’t too overzealous either.

Vanilla Bean Buttercream Frosting

1. Beat the butter until creamy, then stir in the salt. Gradually add the powdered sugar until completely combined.
2. Stir in the vanilla bean paste until incorporated.
3. Add the heavy cream as needed until you have a smooth frosting, then beat on high until fluffy.
4. Pipe over your completely cooled cupcakes. I use the Ateco 848 tip for this!

SAM’S TIP: If you don’t plan to pipe your frosting as generously as I do here, you can halve the recipe. As written, it makes quite a lot of frosting!

Frequently Asked Questions

Which frosting do you prefer on your vanilla cupcakes–chocolate or vanilla?

Enjoy!

Let’s bake together! Subscribe to my newsletter to be notified of all the newest recipes, and find my free recipe tutorials on YouTube 💜

I originally shared this Vanilla Cupcake Recipe 05/15/2017. Post has been updated and a video added. The recipe remains the same.

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