The Poppy Petals: Epic fail of volume and scale

Don't you love how life always teaches you lessons?
Here are some lessons I learned just in the last hour!! I know you are impressed but read on dear reader and I will impress you even more. no really
When reading a recipe, the recipe may not indicate exactly how much of something you might end up with.
In this case, I am working with a established cake recipe. I wanted to make a test batch to see if this is a good recipe and passes my taste test for possible commercial cupcake sales.
While measuring, mixing and stirring I missed several clues about how many cupcakes I would end up with.
Here are a few that seem important now:
1) how many cups of batter will the recipe make? This will mean nothing to you when you don't know how may cups it takes to make a dozen cupcakes.
1) Be suspicious about recipes that say 'grease and flour the PANS'.
2) 6 cups of flour should be a clue as to how much a recipe will make.
3) another clue is 12 egg whites.
4) 2 cups of milk? In retrospect that seems like a lot!
5) when beating the eggs white to a 'stiff but not dry state', ahem, be aware that this will cause 12 egg whites to grow to approximately 1000 times their previous volume. Then during the next step of 'gently fold the eggs whites into the batter' a note would have been nice indicating that I would need a bathtub to hold everything. (clean up would be way easier)

Here is a lovely pic (be kind enough to dismiss the messy bowl and handle of the scraper..they went through a lot). This is after 1 batch was put in the oven. Hard to tell the scale of the bowl, but trust me when I say there are at least 4 dozen more in there.

I just pulled the first batch out and put in the next. There is for sure at least 3 more batches to go. This may be a long process since I only have 1 cupcake pan. So far they look nice but I haven't tasted them yet.