Ren Behan - Author Wild Honey and Rye

Food Writer

Cupcakes

Creme Egg Cupcakes

Have fun this Easter with these Creme Egg Cupcakes!

Creme Egg Cupcakes

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Creme Egg Cupcakes

Prep

Cook

Total

Yield 12 cakes

Made with Cadbury's Creme Eggs, for a egg-stra special treat this Easter. 

Ingredients

125g caster sugar
125g unsalted butter or margarine, at room temperature
2 eggs, beaten
100g self-raising flour (or plain flour + 1 tsp baking powder)
25g cocoa powder
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 tbsp milk
12 large Crème eggs, unwrapped
For the vanilla frosting
125g unsalted butter, at room temperature
250g icing sugar
2 tsp vanilla extract
2 tbsp milk
To decorate
12 mini Crème eggs, unwrapped

Instructions

  1.  Place the large Crème eggs into the freezer. Preheat the oven to 180C/160C fan/gas 4. Line a 12-hole muffin tin with cupcake liners.
  2. Beat the sugar and butter or margarine together in a bowl until light and fluffy. Slowly add in the eggs and a tablespoon of flour at a time. Sift in the rest of the flour and the cocoa powder and mix well. Stir in the milk and mix again.
  3. Put one spoonful of the cupcake mixture into each paper case. Take the Crème eggs out of the freezer and place one whole egg into the case, pressing it down gently into the mixture. Put another spoonful of the cupcake mixture on top of each egg. Using the back of a teaspoon, gently even out the cupcake mixture in the case, so that the top of the Crème egg is just showing.
  4. Bake in the oven for 15 minutes. Take the cupcakes out of the oven, let them cool in the tin slightly and then place them onto a wire rack.
  5. To make the vanilla frosting, beat the butter for a few minutes until it is pale and creamy. Slowly add in the icing sugar until it is all incorporated and beat for a few minutes. Add the vanilla, followed by the milk to loosen the mixture slightly. Transfer the buttercream into a piping bag fitted with a round-holed nozzle.
  6. Pipe the buttercream onto each cupcake and decorate each cake with one mini egg, cut into two halves.

Courses Dessert

You may also like:

Nigella’s Brownies with leftover mini eggs

No Bake Creme Egg Cheesecake 

Lemon and Poppy Seed Cheeesecake

Hot Cross Buns

Cupcakes & A White Chocolate Malteser Cake – Good Food Channel

There was more than a little cloud of icing sugar in my kitchen this weekend as I busily baked and decorated cakes for the school Christmas fair. Luckily, I’d already had a warm-up, creating some Christmas recipes for the Good Food Channel earlier in November, which provided me with the perfect template for the cake stall and a spot of Christmas baking.

If you’re looking for a festive twist on Christmas cupcakes, then you might enjoy my Mince Pie Cupcakes – made with a vanilla sponge, mincemeat and a luxurious brandy butter icing. You can decorate them with sprinkles, coloured sugar or some retro-picks, as seen here.

Mince Pie Cupcakes

Mince Pie Cupcakes for the Good Food Channel – {Recipe here}

A tiny bit more of a challenge, but not much, are these Profiterole Cupcakes. If you’re not quite up for a ‘Bake Off’ style choux pastry challenge – you could cheat by leaving out the choux pastry step and buying some profiteroles to go on the top. Although I have to say, even though I’ve only made choux pastry once before, it is much easier than you might think, so I’d say have a go at the whole recipe.

Christmas Pudding Cupcakes

Profiterole Cupcakes for the Good Food Channel – {Recipe here}

Finally, if you are up for a spot of Christmas baking and are looking for a Christmas showstopper, this White Chocolate Malteser Cake is actually a simple sponge cake, covered in white chocolate butter cream and topped with white chocolate Maltesers, which makes an impressive centrepiece or star prize for the Christmas raffle! For a little twist, you can also spread a little raspberry jam or lemon curd in between the layers before icing. Then all you need to do is have fun eating the little Malteser balls as they roll off!

White Chocolate Malteser Cake

White Chocolate Malteser Cake for the GoodFood Channel – {Recipe here}

Happy Baking!

Have you come across any festive cupcakes yet this year worth bookmarking? Let me know in the comments box below.

More Festive Ideas –

A Nut-Free Christmas Pudding and Nut-Free Mince Pies for the Good Food Channel

Pierniczki – Polish Spiced Christmas Cookies

Christmas Spiced Cranberry and Plum Chutney

Raspberry and White Chocolate Traybake by Sarah at Maison Cupcake

Gingerbread Cake with Orange Cream Cheese Frosting by A Spoonful of Sugar

Ren Behan is a freelance contributor to the Good Food Channel – styling, photos and recipes author’s own and reflect commissioned content. 

National Cupcake Week – Three Favourite Recipes

It’s National Cupcake Week which means you have the perfect excuse to pre-heat the oven, whip out the butter and icing sugar and get baking and frosting. Every now and again, a new craze or trend, such as cake pops or ‘cronuts’ threaten to knock the cupcake off the sweet treat top spot,  but we all know that the gourmet cupcake will prevail. Here are three of my favourite cupcake recipes to keep you going throughout the week. If you’re going along to a charity coffee morning or school bake sale anytime soon, don’t forget to take a batch along and show off your cupcake prowess, too.

1. Caramel and Cocoa Cupcakes 

In this recipe, I recommend using 60g of caramel of toffee sauce in the frosting. There’s only one way forward when it comes to caramel in a jar, and it’s Bonne Maman Confiture de Caramel, which I have spotted in a few UK supermarkets now. If you really can’t find it, an alternative is Dulce de Leche. You can also hollow out a little bit of your cupcake once its baked (with a teaspoon) and add some the caramel to the cake before frosting. I made these for Valentine’s Day – but who says you need to wait till then to treat yourself to one of these? Warning – you will eat the remainder of the jar of caramel with a spoon. If you really have any caramel left, make these Salted Caramel Chocolate Oatmeal Bars for your next hit.

Caramel and Cocoa Cupcakes

2. Raspberry Ripple and Basil Cupcakes

When the dark nights start to set in, these cupcakes remind me of summertime at the seaside, with white butter-cream or frosting drizzled with a little raspberry ripple sauce. The basil gives a very subtle flavour and also  adds an extra little bit of colour. You can also add one or two leaves into your cake mix if you fancy trying something different.

Raspberry Ripple Cupcakes

 3. Diddy Philly Cupcakes with cinnamon sugar

Finally, let’s not forget the kids. Cupcakes are a great way to get the little ones into the kitchen and you can let them get creative with sprinkles or even little sweeties to decorate the top. You can make a really simple cream cheese topping for your cupcakes with Philadelphia cheese.  If you don’t have a mini cupcake tin, just make 12 regular sized fairy cakes.

Philly Cupcakes

I hope you find the time to bake up a little treat or two!

Don’t forget to search #NationalCupcakeWeek on Twitter for more ideas.

Recipe: Caramel and Cocoa Cupcakes

cupcakes

This is a recipe adapted from a lovely new baking book in my collection, Peggy Porschen’s Boutique Baking. Her cupcake boutique is always filled to the brim with pretty and intricately decorated cakes. It is definitely on my list of places to visit when London-bound. Since receiving the book for Christmas, I’ve had my eye on Peggy’s triple layer Creamy Caramel Cake, but in the end, I wondered if I’d be the only one left eating it. So, I decided to halve the cake mix to make 12 individual cupcakes instead. I added some My Secret Kitchen Vanilla Pudding Spices (cinnamon would work well, too) and used a toffee sauce, since that’s what I had, in place of dulce de leche. Peggy suggests making a sugar syrup to soak into the cakes once baked, but as these were small cupcakes with plenty of sweet frosting on top I didn’t think it was necessary.

[recipe id=”12674″]

 

Diamond Jubilee Cupcake Ideas

More Diamond Jubilee inspiration! Although this time in the form of cupcakes, rather than posh trifles.

I seem to have been very busy baking cupcakes lately, so far I have baked close to sixty British-themed cupcakes and it isn’t even the Jubilee weekend yet! I’ve had lots of fun experimenting with different toppings, decorations and accessories and there are more ideas to come, too.  

 

This post features a batch of strawberry cupcakes – a variation of my lemony cupcakes, using a good quality strawberry essence to flavour the cakes instead of vanilla essence and leaving out the lemon zest. I did also spot some freeze-dried strawberries in the baking section at the supermarket and they would work equally well sprinkled into the cake mixture.

I used a basic vanilla butter cream (beating together double the quantity of icing sugar to butter e.g 125g butter to 250g icing sugar and a tablespoon of milk) to pipe swirls of icing onto my cakes with …

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Raspberry Ripple and Basil Cupcakes

This week I’ve been in my kitchen celebrating the arrival of my shiny new K-Mix – the very generous first prize from Kenwood for my Polish Spiced Christmas Cookies for Let’s Make Christmas hosted by Vanessa Kimbell. I am a very lucky girl indeed and I was super-shocked to hear that I had won out of one hundred and ten entries! Gifts were exchanged and prizes had been won at the Fortnum & Mason Gift Swap, but Vanessa had also opened the competition up to all by hosting an on-line event to run along side. You can see all the entries in Vanessa’s Ultimate Guide to making your own gifts here. Seriously, you would actually have to start making your Christmas gifts now if you even wanted to scratch the surface of all the edible treats that were on offer, including Jams, Pickles and Preserves, Drinkable Gifts, Sweet Gifts and Baked Goods. I was half hoping for a Let’s Make Valentine’s Day…but I think we might have to wait until Easter for another gift-themed blog event. 

With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, I decided to make my inagural ‘K-Mix’ a batch of cupcakes. A little pot of basil sat staring at me on my kitchen windowsill and although I know it’s not a logical combination, I really wanted to use some of it to flavour my cupcakes. My thinking (hear me out) was that during the summer, basil and strawberries work really well together, so perhaps raspberries and basil would do too. I then started thinking of ice-cream and of how we love a drizzle of raspberry sauce and that led me to think that raspberry ripple cupcakes would be a lovely way of cheering us all up. Can anyone follow my thinking?! 

So, although British raspberries are not in season, I usually have some homemade raspberry coulis stored in the freezer, from the lazy, hazy summer or even late autumnal days gone by, but really, any good quality shop-bought raspberry coulis will work here.

As for the basil, just use a tiny amount, chop a few leaves and add them to the buttercream, or if you are not feeling brave enough, just add a spring for decoration along with your raspberry drizzle. 

K-Mix v Kitchenaid

The K-Mix is a dream to use and it is a very welcome addition to my kitchen. Having used a Kitchenaid Artisan stand mixer before, I was able to compare the two. I noticed that the K-Mix is a lot smoother when you first switch it on to mix, no sudden burst, no clouds of flour or icing sugar in your face. You get a K-Beater, dough hook and a whisk and a splash-guard that seems to fit onto the actual machine a lot better than the splash-guard on the Kitchenaid. There is a little lid you can lift on the K-Mix splash-guard so that you can add icing sugar in spoon by spoon and when making buttercream, the whole process seemed a lot cleaner and smoother. There is also a fold function, which is very handy as it means that the K-Mix will very gently fold your flour in, rather than mixing it in and causing the gluten to over-work. All in all,the K-Mix also seems to be a lot more streamlined, meaning that there are less nooks and crannies to clean. I am seriously impressed and were I to be in the position of looking to buy a stand mixer, I would have to think very carefully about my choice. The K-Mix is also British made…you can see how the ticks are stacking up in all the boxes.  

Thank you to Penny at Kenwood UK for arranging delivery of my prize and to Vanessa Kimbell. 

[gmc_recipe 2625]

I’m also sending these pretty cupcakes over to Kate at What Kate Baked who is hosting the February Tea Time Treats Challenge (alternating with Karen from Lavender and Lovage) – with the appropriate theme of Romance!

The cupcake recipe I used is adapted from a BBC Good Food recipe for Rose Cupcakes (which would also be romantic) – regularly cited as being one of the best cupcake recipes around, made with yoghurt to keep the crumb lovely and soft. 

Cupcakes are a perfect rainy (or in our case, snowy) day activity. As usual, I was battling with the stealing little hands who were as ever, eager to pinch these lovely little morsels as soon I had taken a few snaps…  

Tea Time Treats Blogging Challenge

Happy Valentine’s Day! Are you a die-hard romantic or a Valentine’s Day sceptic?!

Where do you ‘stand’ on the K-Mix versus Kitchenaid debate?!

Chocolate Christmas Pudding Cupcakes

There are always so many things that I want to bake/make/do before Christmas and no matter how early I start, I never have enough time to get everything done.  I thought I was well ahead of the game this year by making my first batch of Pierniczki – Polish Spiced Cookies on 9th November. It turns out I wasn’t ahead at all and I still didn’t start things early enough! Those presents will get bought and wrapped soon…

One of the things that was on my ‘to bake’ list were some very cute Christmas Pudding-type cupcakes I’d seen on the BBC Good Food website last Christmas. Despite the fact that these were very rushed and I had to call in the re-inforcements in the form of my friend Monika to help me with the holly leaves, I did make them and that made me very pleased. They were actually for a fundraising event last Saturday and since they were so cute, I thought I would send them over to the gorgeous English Mum for her Big Christmas Bake Off event too.

I only really slightly adapted the recipe so I won’t reproduce it. In fact, you could use any chocolate cupcake recipe you’re happy with.  I added a teaspoon of peppermint essence to mine to give them an extra Christmas boost and I baked the cupcakes in their cases rather than using a silicone tray, keeping them the right way up. If you don’t have time to make the little holly leaves and berries that we made, I’ve seen a few packets of ready-made decorations at the supermarket that would make a fine alternative. You can still find their Christmas Pud Cupcake recipe on BBC Good Food, the original appeared in the magazine in 2009.

Note: if your cupcake wrappers are a bit thin, use two (double line them) that way, they will look better – see cupcake on the bottom left of the cake stand as an example!

I still have at least a million posts that I want to write before Christmas, so I will keep posting! I do promise to post a round-up of all the wonderful recipes that came flooding in for Simple and in Season November/December. I’ll be opening a new round in January.

 

Diddy Cinnamon and Philly Cupcakes

It’s not over yet, brace yourselves for more cupcakes in celebration of National Cupcake Week! My little boy finished his very first full day at school yesterday, so my little girl and I baked some cakes and prepared a little picnic for his return home.

 
We made these yummy mini cupcakes to a recipe sent to me by Melissa on behalf of Philadelphia. The original recipe uses caster sugar and the finely grated rind of an orange, but instead, I chose to use cinnamon sugar in the cake batter as I thought it would go well with the Philly cream cheese in the topping. If you don’t have cinnamon sugar just use plain caster sugar and add a teaspoon of cinnamon to your flour when it goes in.
 
Using little sweets is an easyway to decorate little cakes, we also sometimes use smarties.

They also look just as pretty without the sweets, but they aren’t nearly as much fun for little fingers who want to pick!

 
And, as I discovered myself with a nice cup of tea, the Philly frosting also paired well with a couple of late Autumn raspberries. Well, the first week of school was hard for me too!
 
 
A little thank you also goes to the lovely Zita of Zizi’s Adventures who very kindly gave me the two little place mats you see on the first photo when we met for the first time at Food Blogger Connect this summer.

 

Diddy Philly Cupcakes
Recipe courtesy of Philadelphia
Prep time: 15 minutes
Cook time: 15 minutes
Ingredients:
125 g butter or margarine
125 g caster sugar or cinnamon sugar
2 medium eggs
125 g self-raising
Finely grated rind of 1 orange
1 tbsp skimmed milk
150 g Philadelphia Light
50 g icing sugar
Some colourful cake decorations

 

Method:

1. Beat butter and caster sugar or cinnamon sugar together until light and fluffy. Beat in the eggs, one at a time then fold in the flour, orange rind and the milk.
2.Line mini muffin tin with mini cupcake cases. Spoon the mixture into the cases filling about half full. Bake at 180⁰C, Gas mark 4 for about 12-15 minutes or until golden and risen. Leave to cool.
3.Meanwhile make the frosting by beating the Philly and icing sugar together. When the cakes are completely cold, spread some Philly frosting over each of the cup cakes and decorate as liked.

 

Tips

This mixture may make as many as 36 mini cups cakes depending on their size or alternatively use the mixture to make around 12 usual size cup cakes. The larger cup cakes will take a few extra minutes to cook. Eat same day or store in the fridge over night. I got 24 mini cakes and 4 large cakes from the mixture.
If you don’t have cinnamon sugar, use caster sugar and add one teaspoon of cinnamon into the cake mix with the flour.
I mentioned in my previous cupcake post that a little tip I picked up on a course was to use a piping bag to pipe the batter into the cases – this is how your cases should look if you do this. Ensure that the piping bag just touches the centre of the case as you squirt a bit in…this amount per case will give you perfect little cupcakes ready to decorate.

Also…if you want flatter tops use margarine in place of butter.

If you have little helpers, they’ll prefer the option of just eating most of the mixture and making a mess with the rest! My little girl just swiped the packets of sweets and went to hide instead.


 
Have you been baking cupcakes this week? Is so, what’s your favourite flavour combination?
 
For more cupcake recipes, such as Mini Carrot Cupcakes, visit the Philly Site and look out for tips on the Philly Facebook Page!

 

Cakes 4 Fun – Ultimate Cupcakes

It almost passed me by, but did you know that this week is National Cupcake Week? Yes, officially this is the week that everybody should be flicking on their ovens to get baking some of these scrumptious little morsels. Whenever I think of cupcakes, I am reminded of the course I took at Cakes 4 Fun over in Putney, London, which, in a funny way, sparked my interest in blogging.  

I took the Ultimate Cupcake Course after a chat with one of my ante-natal friends about wanting to do something creative after a couple of years of being knee-deep in nappies and baby-talk. Shortly after taking the course, I decided to start writing about my adventures in food (though oddly I never did get round to writing about the course!) and here we are today.
Cakes 4 Fun are still going strong and their courses continue to be incredibly popular, selling out fast. As well as cupcake courses they offer classes in traditional cake decorating – mini and celebration cakes, macaroons, working with chocolate paste, as well as offering baking masterclasses, chocolate truffle workshops and the PME Professional Diploma. For most of the courses on offer, you don’t need any prior level of knowldge or skills. There are also evening courses available and you are provided with all the ingredients and equipment you will need for your course.
Held in a working cake shop, as I student I got to have a look in their kitchen and see lots of people decorating the most beautiful looking wedding and celebration cakes. It was a little bit like watching an episode of the American show Ace of Cakes, with some of the most impressive creations being decorated by hand to many different specifications.  
The class itself was held in a teaching room separate to the main area of the shop and was large enough to fit six students and a teacher. Our teacher was called Rachael, and she showed us how to make vanilla cupcakes cakes from scratch and gave us a few tips along the way – use margarine if you want to produce cupcakes with a flat top (to decorate with fondant icing as below) and butter if you want cupcakes with a peak.
 
We were also shown how to pipe the cupcake mixture into the cases in the tin (you get a much more even finish and it is easier to gauge the quantity going in than if you use a spoon). Lots of people also recommend using an ice-cream scoop, but ever since taking the course I have used a piping bag, trimmed at the bottom once the mixture is in, no nozzle needed.
We then made a variety of decorations by hand using sugar paste, including using moulds and rolling the paste by hand into shapes, such as the teddy bear cupcake. We also used different types of icing – vanilla and chocolate buttercream icing as well as fondant icing and discs of icing to top in different ways.
I came home proudly brandishing a beautiful box of hand-decorated cupcakes and remember my husband and in-laws gasping at how impressive they were. I immediately uploaded the photos onto Facebook and had more comments than I’d ever received before, which is what made me start to think about sharing my adventures in food through writing about my foodie adventures.
If you are thinking of improving your skills then taking one of these courses is very enjoyable and you can learn a phenomenal amount even in just one day. The tutors at Cakes 4 Fun were all very friendly and knowledgeable and prices start from £40 for a full day course (the cupcake course is around £99 depending on the day selected.)
Cakes 4 Fun are also a member of The British Sugar Craft Guild.
Have you ever taken a cupcake course? If so, did you find that it helped you improve your skills?

Raspberry and White Chocolate Cupcakes

Easter is such a lovely time of year and it is made even better by this glorious weather. Not that you really want to be stuck in your kitchen, but if the urge takes you, here are some easy ideas for decorating Easter cupcakes.

These are white chocolate chip cupcakes filled with seedless raspberry jam, but you could use a chocolate recipe and just use mini eggs, Easter chicks and hundreds and thousands to decorate. Once baked, I used a teaspoon to scoop a bit of cake out from the middle and filled them with the jam, but lemon curd works really well too with white chocolate.
Easter Cupcakes
Easter Cupcakes
Print

Raspberry and White Chocolate Cupcakes

Prep

Cook

Total

Yield 12

Tasty cupcakes to make and decorate over Easter, filled with jam or lemon curd.

Ingredients

  • For the cupcakes
  • 375 g self-raising flour
  • 1 teaspoon baking powder
  • ½ teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
  • ½ teaspoon salt
  • 120ml milk
  • 120ml vegetable or rapeseed oil
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla essence or extract
  • 115g unsalted butter (at room temperature)
  • 225g caster sugar
  • 3 eggs
  • 50g seedless jam or lemon curd
  • For the white chocolate buttercream
  • 50g white chocolate
  • 125g unsalted butter at room temperature
  • 250g icing sugar
  • 2 tablespoons of milk

Instructions

  1. Preheat the oven to 180C/160 fan/gas 5 and line a twelve-hole muffin tin with paper cases.
  2. Sieve the flour, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda and salt into a bowl and leave to one side.
  3. Measure out the milk, oil and vanilla in a jug and also leave to one side.
  4. Whisk the butter and sugar in a mixer until very pale and creamy.
  5. Add the eggs one at a time and mix.
  6. Add the flour mix and milk/oil mix alternately to the mixer until it is combined - be careful not to over mix.Spoon into the paper cases.
  7. Bake for 20 minutes or until a cocktail stick comes out clean. Leave to cool on a wire rack.
  8. Once cooled, using a small spoon, scoop out a hole in the centre of the cupcakes and fill with jam or lemon curd.
  9. For the Buttercream
  10. Melt the white chocolate in a bowl in the microwave (for 30 seconds) or in a bowl over a pan of gently bubbling water. Leave to cool slightly.
  11. In a stand mixer, beat the butter until pale.
  12. Add the icing sugar a little at a time and beat again until smooth.
  13. Pour in the white chocolate a mix well.
  14. Add two tablespoons of milk to loosen the mixture a little if it is too thick.
  15. Pipe your buttercream onto your cooled cakes or spread on with a spatula. Decorate with chocolate mini eggs, chicks and hundreds and thousands.

Happy Easter!

Lemony Spring Cupcakes

Although there are still (officially) a couple of weeks until spring, the first appearance of daffodils in my garden have already cheered me up! It’s been a busy couple of weeks (see below) and I realise I have been slack in posting, but I promise lots of lovely posts in the coming weeks.  Today I have been baking cupcakes for my friend Beejal’s birthday and I wanted to share an easy recipe for lovely moist lemon cupcakes with a lemon curd frosting.

Spring offers so much inspiration and there is so much to post about…Shrove Tuesday/Pancake Day, Mother’s Day, lots of ideas for Easter, the arrival of some wonderful seasonal food.  I have also been invited to attend a cookery demonstration at The Caldesi Cookery School in London and no doubt will come back with some recipes to share and will soon be hosting my first ‘give away’ competition courtesy of Hotel Chocolat so there is lots to come.

Last weekend I had one of the most amazing adventures of my life as I spent the day in the kitchen of  The Waterside Inn, a three Michelin starred French restaurant in the tiny village of Bray overlooking the River Thames.  It was truly amazing to see how the famous “Roux” kitchen works right from the inside. It was a slick operation, let me tell you, nobody wants to drop the ball in that kitchen! I was extremely well looked after and it’s an experience that will stay with me forever…though I won’t be changing my career to become a chef anytime soon!

I also popped along to The London Cocktail Club to take a masterclass, also for Beejal’s birthday.  A few Mojitos and Passion Fruit Martinis down the line and we were mixing like pros!

Back to cupcakes, since I am forever on the hunt for tasty cupcake recipes to try, the gorgeous Vanessa Kimbell sent me a sneaky-preview of a recipe (Vanilla, Elderflower and Rhubarb Cupcakes) from her soon-to-be-published cookery book Prepped! Though as I’m still perfecting my rhubarb jam and elderflower syrup I will have to share these with you at a later date.

For now, here are my Lemony Spring Cupcakes with a Lemon Curd frosting.  My top baking tip for the perfect cupcake is to buy a packet of disposable piping bags (Lakeland sell them). You fill your piping bag with your batter (I use a pint glass to hold the piping bag to free up two hands) then snip off the bottom and pipe the batter into the cases until they are two-thirds full.  It is much easier than using a spoon and I find gives a more even finish.  You could wash the bags or use re-usable ones but the Lakeland bags are great value.  I also use a muffin tray (Wilton) which is deeper and holds the cupcake case better as the cakes cook. Take special care when separating cupcake cases as even the slightest dint or crimple will make a difference to the finished product!

Print

Lemony Spring Cupcakes

Prep

Cook

Total

Yield 18

Lemon Cupcakes with Lemon Curd Butter Cream

Ingredients

  • 375 g self-raising flour
  • 1 teaspoon baking powder
  • ½ teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
  • ½ teaspoon salt
  • 120ml milk
  • 120ml vegetable oil (rapeseed is best)
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla essence or extract
  • 115g unsalted butter (at room temperature)
  • 225g caster sugar
  • 3 eggs
  • 2 tablespoons grated lemon zest
  • Lemon Curd Buttercream
  • 110g unsalted butter at room temperature
  • 500g icing sugar
  • 1 teaspoon lemon essence
  • 2 tablespoons grated lemon zest
  • 1 tablespoon lemon curd
  • 2 tablespoons of milk

Instructions

  1. Preheat oven to 180C/160C fan/gas 4 and line a 12-hole and a 6 hole muffin tin with cupcake liners.
  2. Sieve the flour, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda and salt into a bowl and leave to one side.
  3. Measure out the milk, oil and vanilla in a jug and also leave to one side.
  4. Whisk the butter and sugar in a mixer until very pale and creamy.
  5. Add the eggs one at a time and mix.
  6. Add the flour mix and milk/oil mix alternately to the mixer until it is combined – be careful not to over mix.
  7. Add the grated lemon zest and mix once more.
  8. Pipe the mixture into the prepared tin with cases or spoon in until they are two-thirds full.
  9. Bake in a preheated oven at 180 degrees for 15-20 minutes or until a cocktail stick comes out clean. Leave to cool on a wire rack.
  10. For the Lemon Curd Buttercream
  11. Beat the butter, lemon essence and zest for about three minutes until the butter is pale.
  12. Add half the icing sugar and beat again until smooth.
  13. Add the remaining icing sugar and beat again.
  14. Add two to three tablespoons of milk to loosen the mixture a little if it is too thick.
  15. Pipe your buttercream onto your cooled cakes or spread on with a spatula. Decorate with spring flowers and sprinkles or smarties…!

Courses Cupcakes

  You may also like to read my homemade lemon curd post here: