Cupcakes, cupcakes, cupcakes.

I promise, I do bake other things than cupcakes.  It's just that for a variety of reasons I haven't been too creative in the kitchen lately when it comes to the savouries and I've been reserving my creative juices for baking for events which generally means cupcakes.

First up, here are some vanilla cupcakes, topped with a white chocolate buttercream and Yorkshire Roses made from modelling chocolate that I whipped up for Yorkshire Day at our village hall.

The recipe for the buttercream was 280g each of butter and icing sugar combined, then 200g of melted white chocolate poured in.  I found this was a bit thin, and would have thickened it up a bit with some more sugar if I wasn't out of time.  The flavour was great though, very creamy!

Next up is a scarecrow cupcake cake.  My mother in law has bought Hello, Cupcake! and What's New, Cupcake?  and I think I found this design in the latter of the two and decided I wanted to try it out for Lammas.  We made it a family affair, my 3 year old baked the cakes, and we all decorated them together.  Lovely to be able to cook together and make something in honour of the harvest.

We made a slight adaptation in that I didn't use shredded wheat or crackers to mae the 'straw' and hate but instead used the modelling chocolate again.  I pushed it through a sieve to get the straw effect and used old fashioned modelling techniques to make the rest.

Cupcake experiments - flat or domed?

I've been reading a lot of blogs and watching a fair few YouTube videos as I plan some of the upcoming baking projects that I have in mind and in one, which I do not know, I came across the suggestion that if you wanted flat tops to your cupcakes you should cream the butter and sugar first, if you wanted domes then you used the all in one method.  Intrigued (and still bored from being house bound!) my little boy and I set out to devise an experiment to see if this was true.  We made a 2 ounce mixture each (that is 2 ounces each of butter, sugar and self raising flour with 1 egg and a splash of vanilla), he used the all in one method and I creamed.  We used different colour cake cases to ensure we knew which was which and put them in the oven with high expectations!

The result?  You really couldn't see any difference between the two methods.  The creamed is on the left and the blue on the right in the above picture.  They all tasted good though :)

Poorly party cakes

My little boy has had chicken pox this week, so we've been housebound and entertaining each other with lots of painting, crafts and of course baking.  On Friday some friends were due to come over with their 1 year old in the hopes of infecting him, so I decided we'd make some cakes for the 'poorly party'.  My boy decided he wanted vanilla cakes, and I had some orange buttercream in the freezer that I got out for the occasion.  We covered each cake with a little layer of the buttercream and then coloured some blue and some green for decoration.  We used spotty cake cases, and our plan was to decorate the cakes in spots too however artistic license and 3 year old enthusiasm took over when we were actually icing them - piping bags are FUN!

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!).

Banana Muffins

Bananas.  We love them, and yet there always seems to be that few that go brown and don't get eaten (especially as I myself like my nana's barely ripe, there's like a 24 hour window in which I will actually eat one before the flavour gets too ester-y for me and I give up on them.  However brown bananas give us opportunities for bakery, and necessity is the mother of invention.  So when I have a few brown nanas I either bake up some sugar free banana bread (I will blog this one day, it so good you'd never know it was sugar free), make banana pancakes or banana muffins.

Scouting around for a new nana muffin recipe to try I came across this one on the BBC Good Food site.  It looked simple and tasty, and didn't have a high sugar frosting to it so was more suitable for the bevy of under 5's I was planning on feeding them to!  A simple walnut adorned the top.

They rose beautifully, the recipe says it makes 10 but it easily made 12.  Their surprisingly light and the banana isn't overpowering.  I'm sure they would taste awesome with a cream cheese frosting, or served with creme freche as the recipe suggests, but they were also really, really good plain!

Christmas Pudding Cupcakes

Wow, where did November go?  I may have to go and retro-blog some of Novembers cooking, although a few weeks were spent so full of cold I didn't have the desire to eat, let alone cook!  But here we are in December which of course means festive baking.  Each year at Haxby Memorial Hall, the fundraising team put on a Christmas Tree Festival.  Local businesses and organisations sponsor and decorate trees with prizes being awarded to the best, there is a Christmas Fayre and Father Christmas is in his grotto for the kids to visit.  Last year our business (www.netfysh.com) sponsored a tree as usual, and I decorated it entirely in edibles; candy cane cookies, popcorn garlands, gingerbread (of course!) and topped it with a boiled sugar topper.  I had some leftover mix from the cookies and made little Santa's hat cookies which went down a storm with the kids.  This year the tree is being decorated by my SO, leaving me to bake things for sale at the festival and I knew I wanted to make some cute bakes, as last years cookies went down so well.  I also knew I wanted to make cupcakes, because I had some nice Christmas muffin cases to use.  So the search began...but was rather disappointing.  Other than one recipe that suggested stirring some mincemeat into regular cupcake mix, most of the recipes were just for cupcakes decorated to be Christmassy.  Not what I was after.  But then I came across a recipe at BBC Good Food - Christmas Pudding Cupcakes.  Looked great and had that christmassy flavour I was looking for.  BUT, I didn't have all the ingredients needed in the cupboard, and no time to get to the shops to buy them so I made a few substitutions; soft cheese for sour cream and sweetened cranberries for sour cherries.  I had no custard powder, so added vanilla and yellow food colouring to the icing.

The cakes rose really well when baked, I could have made 18 with the mixture and still had good sized cakes; as it was I had to trim a bit off the top of each cake so it would stand straight when I turned them upside down.  The icing poured nicely over them, and I topped them with a rice paper holly leaf (painted with food colouring to get the green) and a piece of glace cherry for that holly sprig effect.

More cupcakes

I will, I promise, post about something other than naturally gluten free cupcakes soon.  It's just been the kind of week where comfort food was needed and boy do these cakes fit the bill.  Warm from the oven they are delightfully marzipan-ny and even cold (and the next day, they've never lasted longer than that!) they are a joy to the mouth.  For those of you who don't have to forgo wheat you probably won't understand me waxing lyrical about cakes you can eat the next day any more than you would have understood my rapture about the flat bread recipe, but believe me; the GF cakes that you can buy in the shops are dry and flavourless, often over sweet to compensate and don't last so to be able to home bake something so wonderful is a real treat.

Today I experimented with putting chocolate chips in, but the thin batter won't support them (I had tried with cherries a few days ago which wasn't a success either!) so I think these are going to be the kind of cake you flavour (or perhaps fill) rather than add things to.

Cupcakes take 2

To make 6 muffin case size cakes:


4 ounces of soft cheese
4 ounces of caster sugar
4 ounces of ground almonds
2 eggs
1/2 teaspoon of baking powder


Cream the cheese and sugar together, then add eggs, almonds and baking powder and mix to a smooth batter.  Pour into cases and bake at Gas Mark 3 for 20-25 minutes.

These were far better in texture than the previous attempt, not greasy at all but deliciously moist.  What's more they were even better the next day, whereas making GF cupcakes with GF flour I've found they need to be eaten the day they're made (not just an excuse for gluttony, honest!)  I'm sure they can be improved on though, any suggestions?

The search for a naturally gluten free cupcake

Whilst drooling over the pictures on Sweet Sugar Sixpence's Facebook page, I saw that someone had asked if they did gluten free cakes.  They said they didn't.  Now I can see why, because these ladies make the most delicious, perfect, decadent cakes and why would they want to make a substitute that wasn't quite as good? (as GF cakes rarely are!)  Which got me to thinking about making a delicious, but naturally gluten free cake.  Not something made with crazy mixes of 'flours' but a cake that just didn't have wheat in it.

A few weeks ago I made a rather lovely apple and almond pudding, the topping for which was very cake like, so I used that as the basis for my first experiment.  2 ounces each of sugar, ground almonds and butter with one egg, 1/2 teaspoon of baking powder and a dash of vanilla essence.  This made enough mixture for 3 muffin cases, just enough for a small trial, and I baked them at Gas Mark 3 for just over 20 minutes.  I tried to take them out at about 18 minutes but they were still a bit wobbly, and they sank considerably as I dithered with the oven door open so might have stayed more risen had I been more patient.  What I hadn't considered was that in the pudding the butter had melted down into the apple and sugar to make a tasty caremalised sauce, but in the muffin cases there was nowhere for it to go.  As a result the pudding topping was a good deal more cakey than the muffins which are quite greasy.  They taste amazing though!

I think they're a promising start.  My next attempt will be made using cream cheese instead of butter, as I've noticed a lot of low carb/gluten free recipes use this quite successfully.  Watch this space!