Lavender Cupcakes

With Ostara coming up my thoughts turned to what I could bake that would really encapsulate the essence of spring.  Now when I think spring, I think that warm sunshine on your face, the emergence of the first green and spring flowers.  But how to put that into a cake?  Well, a few months ago I was reading Sweet Sugar Sixpence's blog that they had been making rose and lavender cupcakes.  The idea stuck in my mind and popped out again for this baking conundrum, and so I did some googling until I found a recipe that looked like a good contender on the Homes and Property website.  I have a huge bag of lavender seeds in my craft room that have been hanging around for a while, bought for making fragranced wheat bags and now sitting waiting for something else so that wasn't a problem to find.

The recipe was an easy one to follow, so long as you remember to put your flowers into the milk to infuse in plenty of time the rest is child's play.  The mixture smelled divine, the aroma as they cooked was a warm meadow and once they were frosted and ready to eat?  Moist, fragrant, heaven.  My SO, not really the sort to resort to purple prose dubbed them 'like eating part of spring'.  The lavender flavour was perfectly balanced, it wasn't subtle, there was no doubt that you were eating a lavender cake but it also wasn't overpowering.  They were, in a word, wonderful.

Thoughts of rose cakes were abandoned for now (perhaps for one of the summer sabbats!) and the lavender has been declared the official cupcake of spring.

Just a note, the recipe made 12 cupcakes, not the muffin size cakes, and the frosting volume could probably be halved unless you want a really thick layer.  They looked so pretty topped with a sugar flower (even if the frosting split because I used dairy free spread!).