Passion Fruit Curd Mother's Day Cupcakes

I made these cupcakes for Mother’s Day for my mum, my mother-in-law - and me!

I’ve developed quite a taste for passion fruit recently - Passoa passion fruit liqueur is delicious and could definitely be used in baking, but since my four year old daughter was going to have these cupcakes as well I wasn’t going to use alcohol. Instead, I got the passionfruit flavour from a combination of yogurt - papaya, passion fruit and mango flavour, from Morrisons - and passion fruit curd (The Cherry Tree brand, from Ocado).

I wanted a light cupcake using yogurt in the cake mix and these were so light and airy, they probably aren’t robust enough to put a spoonful of curd into the middle but I did anyway (it just makes them a bit messy when you eat them!).

Here is the recipe I used:

125g margarine or butter, softened

150g sugar

2 eggs

150ml yogurt - I used papaya, passion fruit and mango flavour from Morrison's 

225g self-raising flour

1 heaped tsp baking powder

Pinch of salt

For the filling:

Passionfruit curd - I used the Cherry Tree brand from Ocado

For the icing:

500g icing sugar

250g butter, softened

Passionfruit flavouring to taste - for example you could add a spoonful of the passionfruit curd, or passionfruit liqueur if the cakes are for adults.

Preheat oven to 180C. Cream the butter and the sugar then beat in the eggs, one at a time. Stir in the yogurt, then fold in the flour, baking powder and salt.

Spoon into cupcake cases and bake for around 15-20 minutes depending on the size until the tops are golden brown.

Allow to cool, then using a teaspoon make a small well in each cupcake and add a spoonful of passionfruit curd.

To make the buttercream, cream together the butter and icing sugar and add a spoonful of passionfruit curd, or a few drops of passionfruit liqueur if for adults only - you may need to adjust the quantity of icing sugar if the mixture is too runny.

Using a piping bag and a nozzle, pipe swirls onto the top of the cupcakes. 

I decorated these cupcakes in different ways:

SuckUK customisable cookie stamp - this is a wooden stamp that comes with a plastic disc and little letters, that you insert into the disc to make the message of your choice. You can stamp this onto a cookie before it has baked, or stamp onto a circle of fondant icing, as I did here. I've had this piece of equipment for ages but this was the first time I had used it.

It was quite fiddly to get the letters into the right places, and took a bit of trial and error to work out if they were all the right way around; there isn't a huge amount of space for a message but I managed to get 'happy' across the top, 'mothers' day along the bottom and 'day' in the middle. However, there was only one of most letters and not enough to spell out 'happy' for instance as there was only one 'p', so I had to stamp the missing letter separately. It didn't quite look the same and I was surprised given that 'happy birthday' would be, to me, the most obvious message to use on the cookie stamp that there weren't enough letters to make it! Then I piped some small buttercream flowers around the edge.

Wilton Make Any Message Letterpress Set - this was also something I received as a gift several years ago. The letters are bigger than on the SukUK stamp so I just pressed 'mum' into a circle of fondant icing and placed it on top of each cupcake with a little buttercream. Then I piped some buttercream flowers along the top and bottom.

Piped flowers: I used two different colours of buttercream (pink and purple, though the latter looks a bit grey in this photo), and two different nozzles to pipe a swirl and some smaller flowers onto each cupcake and added some edible silver balls on top.

Orange and White Chocolate Cake with Flower Nozzles Piped Buttercream Flowers

This is the cake I made for Mother's Day this year and finally tried out my set of flower piping nozzles which I got I think for my birthday last year - I hadn't gotten around to using them as I hadn't really made anything that I wanted to decorate with buttercream, but now I've seen how good they are I will definitely use them again!

The nozzles have different patterns of dots and swirls and allow you to pipe different types of flowers that look amazingly realistic and detailed. You just squeeze the buttercream out and pull up, which cuts off the flower -you pipe one at a time. These would work really well on cupcakes, or as I've done with different types and colours of flower covering a large cake, or you could do all the same type of flower on the top of the cake.

You use regular buttercream for this - it needs to be stiff enough to hold its shape but not too stiff that you can't pipe comfortably.

The cake itself is a recipe from the Clandestine Cake Club Cookbook, edited by Lynn Hill. This is one of Lynn's own recipes which I adapted a little; I didn't make the orange syrup and I used more milk as I prefer a looser batter.

You need:
225g butter
225g caster sugar
4 large eggs, beaten
225g self-raising flour
zest of 1 large orange
1/2 tsp baking powder
4 tbsp. milk

For the filling:
150g white chocolate
grated zest of 2 large oranges plus 4 tbsp. juice
200g butter, softened
75g icing sugar

Preheat oven to 190C / 170C fan. Cream the butter and the sugar and beat in the eggs. Fold in the flour, orange zest and baking powder and beat in the milk.

 

Spoon into two greased round cake tins and bake for 20-25 mins

When cooked, allow to cool in the tins then turn out onto a wire rack.

To make the filling, melt the white chocolate in a microwave or bain marie and allow to cool until it is still a consistency that you can stir. Cream together the butter and icing sugar and stir in the melted chocolate and the orange zest and juice.

Mix the buttercream (about 500g icing sugar to 250g butter) and separate into different bowls and add a couple of drops of food colouring to each one. Use the different flower piping nozzles in piping bags with each colour buttercream and pipe groups of a few flowers all around the cake. I filled in the gaps afterwards with green buttercream and a leaf nozzle, at least I think it was a leaf nozzle as it doesn't look quite right, but I still think the overall effect of the cake was good - and it tasted really nice too!

Below are some close-ups of the different flowers I piped:

 

I'm sharing this with Cook Blog Share

 

Mojito Cupcakes

My mum and one of my best friends have their birthdays very close together so usually when I travel down to my home town I try to see them both at once - and I usually bake them both a birthday cake. This year it had to be more of a flying visit (one day rather than an overnight stay) and I felt I barely had time to make one cake the day before, let alone two, as we were up to our ears in wedding planning with only a few weeks to go.

I didn't want to go empty handed though so decided to bake a batch of cupcakes and give them half each in a pretty box. So they had to be quite special cupcakes! I spent a little while thinking about flavours and looking through recipes and chose this recipe for Mojito cupcakes from Baking Mad.

A mojito is a cocktail made from rum, lime juice and mint (a long drink topped up with sparkling water). I had a tiny bottle of Bacardi rum I'd kept from a plane journey, have plenty of mint in my garden and also had some key lime flavoured icing sugar from Sugar & Crumbs I wanted to use up which I thought would be the perfect twist on this recipe.

I didn't have any buttermilk so made my own by adding lemon juice to milk. Here I'm mixing with the Bacardi and vanilla

Ready to go in the oven. Somehow the cake cases were slightly too big for my muffin tin which is why some are a bit crinkled up to fit!

Making the syrup from sugar, water, mint and lime zest (which you then strain)

The cakes just out of the oven

Making a hole in each one with the end of a teaspoon, which I then wiggled around a bit to make a bigger hole! You pour the syrup inside and it soaks in to give a stronger lime and mint flavour at the centre - yum! You can't see the holes once you've piped buttercream on top.

Here's my flavoured icing sugar - it's flavoured with lime so you don't need to add any lime juice, meaning the buttercream stays the right consistency, and it uses all-natural flavours.

 I decided to pipe swirls on the cupcakes using a star nozzle, but while I would usually start on the edge and work inwards, that creates quite a lot of height and as I was going to place a mint leaf on top I wanted flatter frosting. So I started in the middle and piped outwards, which gives a rose effect. I did also add some green food colouring to the icing.

I also added a few drops of rum to the buttercream as well!

Finally I topped each one with a mint leaf.

I'm sharing these with the Eating al Fresco challenge hosted by Munchies and Munchkins, as these would be great for a barbecue or picnic.

I'm also sending these to the Food Year Linkup, hosted by Charlotte's Lively Kitchen, as there are various events taking place this month that these would work for: National BBQ Week, The Big Lunch, National Picnic Week, Cupcake Day and Macmillan Summer Nights!

Goonies-inspired Baby Ruth cupcakes

This is one of the best cupcakes ever, in my opinion – I created the recipe myself and was surprised at how good it was. One of my friends said it was better than most shop-bought cupcakes he’d had!

I call it a Baby Ruth cupcake because it recreates the flavours of the US candy bar Baby Ruth – nougat, caramel, peanut and chocolate. The idea came about for a slightly strange reason….

I regularly take part in a blog challenge called Food ‘n’ Flix, where the person hosting chooses a movie, and we all cook or bake something inspired by that movie. This month Heather at Girlichef has chosen a classic, and one of my favourite films as a child – The Goonies.

 

I don’t know whether the generation younger than me has had as much exposure to the film as I did, but I hope that even kids today are watching it and enjoying it. Aside from a few politically incorrect characters that probably wouldn’t be made fun of in films today, the key themes of the film resonate today as much as they ever did: friendship, hanging on to childhood and growing up, and of course pirates, treasure and adventure!

Unbelievably, the film is 30 years old this year – the main actors, including Sean Aston and Corey Feldman, have gone on to some great things (Samwise Gamgee in Lord of the Rings for instace) and while some aspects of the film look dated, on the whole it doesn’t.

I watched the film again after this challenge was announced and while I had the Baby Ruth idea in my head from the start, there were loads of other food references and things that could inspire me. I even found a website listing everything Chunk eats in the movie which is an awful lot!
I made notes throughout the film of the food references before I went on holiday and unfortunately can't find the piece of paper anywhere, though a few scenes do stick in my mind, such as when the boys are in the Fratellis' restaurant looking for ice cream when they find a dead body in the freezer, and of course the moment when Chunk - taken hostage by the Fratellis - bonds with their physically and mentally disabled brother Sloth by offering him a Baby Ruth bar.

Baby Ruths are made by Nestle and are a bit like a Snickers from what I can tell, with nougat, peanuts, caramel and covered in chocolate. I thought that would work really well in a cupcake and I was right! I made a vanilla cupcake, removed a spoonful of sponge from the centre when it was cooked and added a spoonful of soft nougat, used a salted caramel buttercream from Sugar and Crumbs, scattered the top with chopped peanuts and drizzled Choc Shot (a kind of chocolate sauce) over the top. It tasted unbelievable! The sponge cake was really light and fluffy, the nougat in the centre was amazing and the topping was a wonderful combination of flavours. I made these for a bake sale at work and they disappeared very quickly.

Unfortunately as this was a while ago I can't remember what recipe I used for the vanilla cupcake base but that part is pretty straightforward and you probably have your own recipe or can find one easily.

Here are the vanilla cupcakes before and after baking

 

You can see how I made the nougat in this blog post; you can do it in advance.

 

 Spoon out a little of the centre of the cupcake, add the nougat and put the cake piece back in. It doesn't matter if it is a little messy as you will cover them with buttercream.

 

You can either make plain buttercream and stir in a spoonful or two of Carnation Caramel, or use the pre-flavoured mix I bought from Sugar and Crumbs. Their icing sugars use natural flavourings and come in an amazing range of flavours; the 250g bag was just enough.




Sprinkle with chopped peanuts and drizzle with chocolate sauce - I like Choc Shot but you could also use ice cream sauce. And serve - I can guarantee these won't last long!

I'm sending this to Heather at Girlichef  for Food 'n' Flix.

 

I am also sharing this with We Should Cocoa, as the ingredient chosen this month by Karen at Lavender and Lovage is vanilla, and there is chocolate on top of the cupcake. The challenge was started by Choclette at Tin and Thyme.

 

 

Giant Cookie - Nigella's Buttermilk Birthday Cake

This month's Random Recipes asked us "if you had ten seconds to grab one book, what would it be?". That's cookery books of course - the idea being if you were leaving your house in a hurry and could only take one recipe book with you, which would it be?

I knew right away - even though I have over 100 cookery books, one in particular stands out: Nigella's How To Be a Domestic Goddess. Not because it's my favourite or even the one that I use most, but because it was one of the first cookery books that I owned. I was given it as a birthday present by my friends, who all clubbed together (£20 was a lot of money to a student back then!) and presented it to me on what I think was my 20th birthday. It's a huge book with a lot of recipes, and I like the idea that they are all themed around being a 'domestic goddess' - so mainly cakes but with biscuits and savoury pies and the like. My favourite chapter is called 'the chocolate cake hall of fame'. I think that while I was swamped in academia I rather liked the idea of being a domestic goddess at the same time- even though my entire cooking facilities consisted of a double hot plate (provided by the university) and a mini oven (provided by my grandmother who used to have it in her camper van- so I was the only one in my building with an oven!). So I guess the other reason this cookery book would be the one I grabbed in a hurry is because of the memories that are attached to it.

So in accordance with the Random Recipes challenge, I opened the book at random and decided I would make whatever was on that page: it was the buttermilk birthday cake on page 210.

I can't find the recipe on Nigella's official website but there is a version of it - with small differences - on the Guardian website here. 

Preheat the oven to 180C. Cream the butter and the sugar together.

Mix in the eggs, then the flour, bicarb of soda and salt (the recipe I used didn't include the lemon).

Finally fold in the buttermilk and vanilla

In the book, Nigella talks about using different moulds like Barbie or a train - this is after all meant to be a children's birthday cake. I had a giant cookie mould I'd bought ages ago and never used, and thought this would be a good opportunity.

There are two silicon moulds of equal size, with a flower pattern and 'cookie' word in the middle. The moulds are very strong and robust and worked really well.

Spoon the mixture equally into the two tins and bake in the oven for about 25 minutes (the exact time will depend on the size and depth of the mould you are using).

You can see the pattern on the baked cake, though it is a little hard to read the word 'cookie'.

I mixed icing sugar with butter and some melted white chocolate to make a delicious buttercream, and used it to fill the cake.

It does look like a giant custard cream!

I'm sending this to Random Recipes, hosted by Dom at Belleau Kitchen.