3 Fancy Cupcake Recipes (that are far easier than they look)
Today I’ve got a brilliant set of cupcake recipes for you.
Trust me, if your granny makes a cake, she probably follows this recipe…
I had one of my favourite friends come to stay for the weekend and as per our traditions over the last 17 years of friendship, we wanted to include some baking. Now, our usual speciality is a wellington square, a bit like in the recipe I did a few years ago here. However, as she’d just started a new job, and wanted to of course impress her new colleagues, we settled on cupcakes!
Three different flavours of cupcakes…
I present to you: White chocolate and raspberry, salted caramel and lemon curd.
The basic recipe is such an easy one to remember as well, 6oz sugar, 6oz butter, 6oz self raising flour and 3 eggs. Boom.
Simply cream together the sugar and the butter, crack in one egg at a time and whiz up, then follow with the sifted self raising flour. There’s your basic cupcake recipe, done and dusted! We then separated the mix into three bowls, one for each flavour of cupcake and to the white choc and raspberry we added vanilla, 50g white chocolate chopped into chunks, and a handful of chopped up fresh raspberries. To the salted caramel, we added cocoa to make the sponge chocolate, and to the lemon curd we added, well, lemon curd (and a dash of lemon juice and lemon zest).
Spoon an even amount of mixture into your bun cases, pop them into the oven at 180 degrees C for 15-20 minutes until firm and then bring them out to cool on a rack.
Meanwhile, whip up some delicious buttercream using icing sugar and a dollop of soft butter, and then add your choice of flavouring. Lemon curd in the lemon curd ones (obvs), 50g melted white choc and freeze dried raspberries (you can buy these in most supermarkets in the baking aisles) in another, maybe with a little more vanilla extract and salted caramel in the last one.
Now, you can buy carnation caramel in a tin (located by the condensed milk usually) and add some salt to it, you can even buy some ready made salted caramel variety, OR you can make your own.
To do so, tip a job lot of light brown sugar into a pan with a few tbsp of water. Simmer on a low heat not stirring until it’s melted and starting to bubble. then throw in a chunk of butter that would cover about 3 pieces of toast liberally, and a dash of cream about the same amount as you’d throw onto a pudding. Whisk this all up on high heat until it starts to thicken, then take off and cool, adding in some vanilla and a good pinch of cornish seasalt as you do it!
For the piping, I used a medium round nozzle, a star nozzle, and a flat jaggedy nozzle. Practice on some baking parchment first, you can always scrape it into the bag again afterwards. Make sure your cupcakes are cold, else the icing will run right off. Then just decorate and go for it!
These really won’t disappoint, promise!
