lemon cupcakes

These little zesty bites made up the other half of the cupcake team for the wedding that I baked for last weekend.

They are incredibly simple - essentially a basic sponge recipe with some lemon zest & juice.

Here we go...

Lemon Cupcakes makes 12 large cupcakes, 24 small

ingredients  

225g / 8oz butter at room temp
225g / 8oz caster sugar
225g self raising flour
3 eggs
zest of 1 lemon (if you like super-lemony, use 2!)
a squeeze of lemon juice

1) Pre-heat the oven to 180C / Gas mark 4 & line muffin trays with paper cases.

2) In a large mixing bowl, beat together the butter and sugar until creamy.


3) Beat in the eggs, one at a time, adding a little flour (sieved) after each addition.

4) Fold in the remaining flour & lemon zest.

5) Stir in the lemon juice.

6) Spoon a heaped dessertspoon of mixture into each case, being careful not to overfill to allow space for the frosting.


7) Bake in the pre-heated oven for 15 - 20mins until going ever so slightly golden around the edges.


8) Remove from the oven and leave to cool on a wire rack, ready for frosting.

Cake Count :: 800

wedding cupcakes

Weddings & cakes, cakes & weddings. These words are music to my ears.

Weddings & cakes & 'Hannah, will you make some cakes for my wedding?'

Well, that's more like an orchestra reaching its crescendo in my ears.

A few months ago, I had the joy of hearing this crescendo which culminates in one thing.

Baking. 

So here's how I rolled for the wedding at the weekend....

The order:

Chocolate Cupcakes with Chocolate Buttercream Frosting (like you've never tasted before)
Lemon Cupcakes with Lemon Buttercream Frosting

For both types of cake I used very simple & straightforward recipes - the kind you know like the back of your hand. 

The frostings are the most time consuming element for both, but they're worth the effort, promise. So as not to overwhelm you with recipes, I will post them in separate posts.

Chocolate Cupcakes: recipe: from my Mother's kitchen

ingredients

225g / 8oz butter at room temperature
225g / 80z caster sugar
200g self raising flour
25g cocoa
4 eggs

NB: I had been asked to make relatively small cakes for the wedding, therefore these quanities yielded far more than if I had used cupcake cases & trays, but you can use whatever size you like, depending on how little or large you like your cakes to be.

1) Preheat the oven to 180C / Gas mark 4 & line your bun trays (whatever size you like) with cases.

2) In a large mixing bowl, beat together the butter and sugar until creamy. Beat in one egg.

3) Add another egg & sieve in a little flour then beat together. Repeat this for the remaining eggs,

4) Fold in the remaining flour & cocoa (sieved) with a metal spoon. 

(If you are fortunate enough to have a free standing mixer, then you probably just want to mix in the flour on a low speed. If speed is of the essence in your baking, just use electric beaters to mix in the flour. I am still a little old fashioned and like to follow my mother's technique.. She does everything by hand, but I only apply this to folding in where adding air is the main aim to get well-risen cakes.)

5) If your mixture is a little stiff, I would recommend adding a little slosh of milk to loosen it up nicely.

6) Spoon generous desertspoons of mixture into your cupcake cases. If you are using smaller cases, I would suggest using a teaspoon's worth of mixture instead. Be careful not to overfill the cases as you want to allow room for the icing. 

7) Bake in your pre-heated oven for 15 - 18 minutes (smaller cakes will require less time). A little trick my Mother taught me for telling when your cakes are baked is to listen to them. Yep, you read that correctly. Take your tray of piping hot buns and put your ear near to the tray (don't burn yourself though!!). If you can hear a little crackling sound emanating from them, they need a few more minutes. 

Alternatively, you could use a skewer, which should come out clean when inserted into the centre of the cake, but I think this is too much faff for little cakes.

8) When your cakes have had their time in the oven, remove and place on a wire cooling rack. Leave in the tins for a few minutes and then place onto the rack to cool completely before icing.

The recipe for the frosting will be coming soon...

Cake Count :: 753 

Cake Friday

One of the children I look after goes to a secondary school where they employ this brilliant idea:

Cake Friday

Each Friday, three children in the tutor group bakes enough cakes for 1 per pupil, so everyone gets 3 cakes.

Last week, it was our turn to bake, but it was a bit of a last minute thing, and tagged on to the end of an afternoon of baking these and these. So this is what we cobbled together:

Chocolate Honeycomb Crunch
Ingredients:
225g / 8oz butter
225g / 8oz caster sugar
200g / 7oz self raising flour
25g / 1oz cocoa
3 eggs

For the Icing:
50g / 2oz hard margerine (comes in 250g block form - I use Stork)
200g / 7oz icing sugar, sifted
25g / 1oz cocoa
2 tbsp milk
1 Crunchie Bar, crushed


1 :: Preheat the oven to 180C / Gas Mark 4
2 :: Place 24 cupcake cases in two 12-hole muffin trays (if you only have one, just bake in two batches)
3 :: In a large mixing bowl, beat together the butter and sugar until creamy
4 :: Add the eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition
5 :: Sift in the flour & cocoa and fold in with a metal spoon. (If you want to be speedy, just carrying on mixing with electric beaters)
6 :: Put 1.5 heaped dessertspoons of the mixture into each cupcase
7 :: Bake in the preheated oven for 15 - 20 mins, then leave to cool on a wire cooling rack.

For the Icing
1 :: Melt the butter in a saucepan
2 :: Remove from heat then add the sifted icing sugar & cocoa, stirring gently with a wooden spoon. At this stage, the icing will not look like a great consistency, but don't worry, the milk changes that.
3 :: Add the milk and beat until a smooth, shiny consistency is reached.
4 :: Using a knife, spread a generous amount of the icing onto each cooled cupcake.
5 :: Sprinkle a little bit of honeycomb-Crunchie goodness onto each cake.


Sidenote: I often find that the fat separates from the sugar - I haven't yet worked out why this is but the solution is to add a little more milk. It works like a dream.

Cake Count :: 558

Baking in miniature {revisited}

As it happens, my plans to bake 2010 cakes managed to take a hurtle forward towards looking slighttly more achieveable than when the idea was first conceived, when I got a call from a friend asking me to bake for an event our church was holding.

It also happens that I have done a fair bit of baking since then, so to save repeating myself, and to try and get up to speed on this little blog before I do any more baking, I'm afraid I'm going to cheat and give you a link back to my initial post over on my other blog to give you a bit more of a review of what I baked.

(The brownies featured at the top are the miniature version of the brownies I presented in the last post.)

Cake count :: 454

First Up :: Black Bottomed cupcakes

With the dawning of 2010 I didn't have to wait long for a birthday to bake for.

Now, I think cupcakes for birthdays are quite a brilliant idea, but I have started to wonder if there is a downside to them in that you get less cake than you would with a full size birthday cake.

Personally I find that they're easier to prettify (real word? don't know. Definition? To make something look pretty), and I think there's something quite endearing about them too. Is there something slightly disappointing about getting cupcakes for your birthday instead of a big fat full-on cake? Thoughts, anyone?

Anyway, onto these babies:

Black bottom cupcakes :: Recipe courtesy of The Hummingbird Bakery

Every now and then, I look at the ingredients list on a recipe and think. 'really?! will that actually work?'
I had that very thought when I looked at the recipe for the bbc's.
This cake is two-in its nature - a little bit of sponge and a little bit of cheesecake. Not your usual combination, but hey, The Hummingbird Bakery seems to be doing pretty well so I'm not ready to dispute them just yet.

The chocolate bottom of the cake involves making a sponge-type cake with oil instead of butter - something that I've come across in carrot cake recipe's a lot, but never in chocolate cake.
Then there's the cheesecake element, which has egg in. Also seemed a little weird to me, but I just rolled with it, did as the recipe said, and procurred some delicious cupcakes.

Cake Count :: 12