Carrot cupcakes with orange buttercream

It’s been a busy couple of months with lots of friends and family visiting! I made these carrot cupcakes about a month ago, when some friends were visiting on their way down from Leeds to Cornwall. I fancied making these as I haven’t made them for ages – they are a fairly quick and easy cake to make but they taste delicious.

The recipe comes from my “go to” Cupcakes from the Primrose Bakery book. I’ve made them before and they work brilliantly well with the orange cream cheese icing in the book, however, they then need to be kept in the fridge. As my friends were travelling onwards, I wanted to give them some for their holiday and so I stuck with a simple orange buttercream and a sprinkle of cinnamon.

The recipe is simple and these are a very reliable bake. The mixture is a lot runnier than most cake mixtures, but don’t be alarmed by this. If you have time before you start baking, soak the raisins in a mixture of boiling water, orange juice and a bit of cinnamon and they will plump up beautifully.  The recipe calls for 130g raisins, but I usually chuck a few more in.

Carrot cupcakes with orange buttercream

Ingredients

1. 225g carrots, peeled and trimmed
2. 130g raisins
3. 2 large eggs
4. 130g caster sugar
5. 120ml corn oil
6. ½ tsp vanilla extract
7. Grated zest of 1 orange
8. 120g plain flour
9. 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
10. Pinch of salt
11. 1 tsp ground cinnamon

Orange buttercream

1. 115g butter, at room temperature
2. 500g icing sugar, sifted
3. 4 tblsp freshly squeezed orange juice

Method

1. Pre-heat the oven to 160C.
2. Line a 12 hole muffin tin with cupcake cases.
3. Finely grate the carrots and drain off any liquid.
4. Combine the grated carrot with the raisins in a large bowl and set to one side.
5. Using a stand mixer, beat the eggs and sugar together for several minutes.
6. Add the oil, vanilla and orange zest and beat well.
7. Sift the flour, bicarbonate of soda, salt and cinnamon together in another bowl.
8. Gradually add these ingredients to the egg and sugar mixture, folding carefully after each addition.
9. Pour this mixture into the bowl containing the carrots and raisins and mix with a wooden spoon until evenly distributed.
10. Carefully spoon the mixture into the cupcake cases, filling them to about two-thirds full.
11. Bake in the oven for about 25 minutes, until the cakes bounce back when touched.
12. Remove from the oven and leave the cakes in the tin for about ten minutes before placing on a wire rack to cool.
13. To make the buttercream, beat the butter, juice and half of the icing sugar until smooth.
14. Add the rest of the icing sugar and beat until smooth and creamy.
15. Spoon the buttercream into a piping bag topped with a Wilton 1M piping nozzle.
16. Once the cakes have cooled, pipe a swirl of buttercream onto the cakes and top with a sprinkle of cinnamon. 

Old reliables!

August is a crazy busy time at my work and we have to work some very long hours. Therefore, cake is a necessity to see us through! However, working long hours means that I haven’t had the time or energy to be creative or try anything new – definitely time to stick to making old reliables! 

One of my most reliable and best-loved recipes is my sticky ginger cake with lemon icing. I made three of these a couple of weekends ago and they all turned out beautifully. The fabulous thing about this cake is that it lasts at least two weeks, and even improves for being left to mature. The cake has a deep rich flavour and moist, sticky texture that is beautifully balanced by the sharp tanginess of the lemon icing.

Another of my favourite recipes is my Primrose Bakery lemon layer cake (made also here). This week, I decided to keep it really simple and just make a two layer cake (225g golden castor sugar, s-r flour and butter, 1.5 tsp baking powder, 25g cornflour, 4 large eggs, zest and juice of 2-3 lemons). I sandwiched the two layers with lemon curd, smothered the sides with lemon buttercream, filled the top with curd and then topped with buttercream piped stars around the top edge. Apologies – it was all a bit of a rush and I forgot to take a photo! This cake always tastes deliciously moist and zingy! 

Finally this week, I decided to make my Apple Amazing Cake – a cake that I have made loads of times but not for ages. It’s a fairly simple cake to make – as long as you remember that it will take about 3 hours to bake! It’s a mammoth of a cake, so great if you are baking for lots of people. I was a little disappointed with this cake this week – it just didn’t have the flavour that I remembered. It is quite a savoury cake – more like a light fruit cake. I’m not quite sure why it wasn’t right this time – could have been the apples – I’ve always made it with huge Bramley apples, but this time the shop only had fairly small measly apples and I wonder if they were lacking flavour. I also over-cooked the apples slightly, so that they were fully reduced to a mush, rather than having a few nice juicy lumps remaining. Think that I may need to give this another go in a few months when apples are at their best, to see if this recipe really is as good as I remember it to be!   

Lemon layer cake with lemon buttercream roses

Birthday cake time! Not for me but for a very good friend. As I know she loves lemon cake, I decided to stick with a safe and well-trusted recipe that I have done before – Primrose Bakery’s Lemon Layer Cake. I won’t type out the recipe again, as it is the one I wrote a blog on in November for my Halloween Lemon Layer Cake.  We were going out for dinner on Friday so the cake had to be made on Thursday after work. Thankfully, it’s a fairly simple cake to make and bake – as long as you get the timings right.

This time, rather than buttering the sandwich tins and lining the bases, I used my trusty Dr Oetker Cake Release spray – it is so easy to use and does the job really well.  I think I mentioned it last time, but do make sure you keep an eye on these cakes – you do not want them to over-bake. This time, the cakes still looked slightly anaemic, but were bouncy when touched – this is what you are looking for.

As I was baking this after work, it was quite late by the time the cakes had baked and cooled, therefore, I decided to just do a crumb layer of buttercream icing on the Thursday night. A crumb layer is basically just a simple thin covering of icing all over the cake. This seals the cake and creates a good base for then icing the roses.  Leaving it overnight meant that this layer of buttercream had firmed really well and made it much easier to pipe the roses.

The buttercream is best left in the fridge overnight but needs to be taken out of the fridge for at least an hour before using, and then given a really good beat!  People are always amazed by rose swirls on cakes and cupcakes but they are really not that difficult to do. This is a good photo tutorial and there are lots of film clips on YouTube. To be honest, the main things are getting the consistency of the buttercream right, a Wilton 2D piping nozzle, steady pressure on the icing bag and lots of practice! I do them quite a bit and I still have days when they just don’t seem to go right!   

I’ve attempted this design of icing before and found the sides to be very tricky. This time, I used my tilting turntable (placed on top of a cake tin to bring it up to a good height) and this made piping the swirls onto the cake much easier!  

For full cake recipe, visit this blog post.

Filling and decorating the cake

Ingredients

1. 6 tblsp lemon curd
2. 220g butter, at room temperature
3. 1kg icing sugar
4. Juice of 2-3 lemons

To make the buttercream icing:

1. In a large mixing bowl, beat the butter, juice of 2 lemons and half of the icing sugar until smooth.
2. Add the rest of the icing sugar and beat until smooth and creamy.
3. Add extra juice, if required to get the correct consistency. Beat until smooth.

To assemble

1. Place the first cake onto your plate / stand.
2. Spread 3 tablespoons of lemon curd on top of the first cake and another 3 on a second cake.
3. Carefully place the second cake on top of the first cake.
4. Place the third cake on top of the others.
5. Use a palette knife to spread a thin layer of buttercream icing evenly all over the cake. Leave to firm.
6. Fill a piping bag (topped with a suitable nozzle) with the remaining buttercream.  
7. Start by piping a rose swirl in the centre of the cake, then work outwards and down the sides of the cake.
8. Fill any gaps with swirls of icing.

Chocolate Orange Cake Pops

Yesterday, I decided it was time to use up the orange cake that I had in the freezer from my failed Disney castle cake. I’d taken the cake out of the freezer on Friday night and it was soft, moist and ready-to-go by mid-afternoon. As Christmas is fast approaching, I decided on a chocolate orange buttercream – adapting the chocolate buttercream in the “Cupcakes from the Primrose Bakery” book by using orange zest, orange juice and a splash of orange essence rather than milk.

I followed the method described in Carolyn White’s Cake Pops book. Trying to make perfect spheres out of the sticky buttercream and cake crumb mixture isn’t that easy but I gave it a go! Having left them to firm on a tray in the fridge – they came out with rather flat bottoms! Not sure if this is avoidable without a mould.  

I used two different coatings for my cake pops: Silver Spoon orange flavour buttons and Wilton Light Cocoa Candy Melts. I used the double-boiler method of melting these, adding a few drops of orange essence to the candy melts. It was necessary to add quite a bit of oil (I used sunflower oil rather than vegetable oil as that was what we had in the cupboard!) to make the chocolate runny enough to pour over the cake pops. The book suggested that you could dip the cake pops into the melted chocolate to coat – this just didn’t work for me so I decided that it was a much better idea to pour the melted chocolate over the cake pops using a spoon. I don’t think I got the melting/tempering quite right as the chocolate on the cake pops didn’t quite have the snap of correctly tempered chocolate.

Overall – I was really pleased with the flavour of these cake pops: the chocolate orange tasted delicious. I’m not completely sure about the texture – it all seemed a little soft and squidgy. I’ve not had cake pops before so I’m not sure if this is typical – as mentioned above, correctly tempered chocolate would have added more of a snap. I guess you could also add in some crunchy bits – maybe some chocolate drops, or honeycomb could be nice.

In all, I’m not really a convert to cake pops – it seems like quite a bit of effort for an end result that I’m not completely convinced by. I wouldn’t bother making cake specifically for this but may give them another go if I had some left-over cake crumbs again at some point.

For the orange cake:

Ingredients

1. 225g golden castor sugar
2. 225g self-raising flour
3. 1.5 tsp baking powder
4. 25g cornflour
5. 225g butter, at room temperature
6. 4 large eggs
7. Grated zest and juice of 2 orange

Method:

1. Pre-heat oven to 175C. Grease and base-line two 20cm sandwich tins.
2. Cream the butter and sugar in a bowl until pale and smooth.
3. Combine the dry ingredients in a separate bowl and stir in the orange zest.
4. Add the eggs, one at a time, to the creamed mixture, mixing for a few minutes after each addition.
5. Stir in one third of the dry ingredients, followed by one third of the juice and repeat until all ingredients are incorporated.
6. Pour mixture gently into tins and spread evenly.
7. Bake for 25-30 minutes or until cake is golden brown and an inserted skewer comes out clean.
8. Leave to cool in tin for 10 minutes.
9. Turn cakes out of tins and leave to cool on a wire rack.

For the chocolate orange buttercream

Ingredients

1. 90g good-quality dark chocolate
2. 112g butter, at room temperature
3. Grated zest of one orange
4. 1-2 tablespoons orange juice
5. 125g icing sugar

Method:

1. Melt the chocolate in a heatproof bowl over a saucepan of barely simmering water.
2. Stir occasionally until it has completely melted. Leave to cool slightly.
3. In a large mixing bowl, beat the butter, juice, zest and icing sugar until smooth.
4. Add the melted chocolate and beat again until thick and creamy.
5. If it looks runny, keep beating – it will thicken.

To make the cake pops (makes about 30)

Additional ingredients:

1. 400g candy melts / chocolate
2. Vegetable / sunflower oil
3. Orange essence
4. Sprinkles / decorations as required

Method:

1. Crumble 600g of cake to a fine crumb (I did this by hand but you could use a food processor).
2. Add 300g of the prepared buttercream to the cake crumbs and mix with a wooden spoon to produce a firm mixture.
3. Use scales to weigh a 30g amount of mixture and roll to a smooth ball.
4. Using a cake pop stick, make a hole in the ball for the stick to go into and then remove the stick.
5. Place the ball down (hole facing downwards) on a tray covered with baking parchment.
6. Once you have rolled 15, place the tray in the fridge and leave for an hour to firm up.
7. Continue to make the rest of the cake pops and then place these in the fridge too.
8. Melt two-thirds of the candy melts / chocolate in a heatproof bowl over a saucepan of barely simmering water.
9. Stir occasionally until it has completely melted.
10. Remove from heat and add the remaining candy melts/chocolate, stirring until they have also melted.
11. Add orange essence to taste.
12. Add enough oil to bring the chocolate to a pouring consistency.
13. Place a few tablespoons into a piping bag.
14. Once cake pops have firmed, remove from the fridge.
15. Pipe chocolate into the hole of each cake pop and push in a cake pop stick.
16. Leave to firm.
17. When the stick is held firmly in place, hold the cake pop over the bowl of melted chocolate and use a spoon to pour chocolate over, until the whole cake pop is covered.
18. Twist the cake pop carefully, allowing the extra chocolate to drip off.
19. Add sprinkles, extra decorations if using.
20. Leave to cool and set.
21. Place remaining chocolate in a piping bag and use to decorate.

Bonfire Night Cupcakes

Ok, so this is a bit of a cheat as I haven’t actually made these cakes this year but seeing as many people will be making cakes in preparation for Bonfire Night parties, I thought I’d write a few quick posts and put up some pictures as inspiration.

I made these lemon cupcakes for a Bonfire party last year – it’s one of my favourite and most regularly used recipes – I love lemon cake! The recipe for the cupcakes and the buttercream icing are from the “Cupcakes from the Primrose Bakery book”, but I added in the lemon curd filling.

Not sure that I would recommend these decorations if you are making the cakes for children – the black icing can be very messy! Creating black icing is quite tricky as you do need quite a bit of food colour – you do need a gel food colour and will need to take the extra liquid into account when mixing up your icing.

Lemon cupcakes with a lemon curd filling and lemon buttercream icing

Ingredients (single batch of 12 cupcakes)

1. 110g butter, at room temperature
2. 225g golden castor sugar
3. 2 large eggs
4. 150g self-raising flour, sifted
5. 125g plain flour, sifted
6. 90ml semi-skimmed milk
7. 2 tblsp lemon juice
8. 1 tblsp sour cream
9. Grated zest of a lemon

Buttercream icing:

1. 110g butter, at room temperature
2. 500g icing sugar, sifted
3. 3 tblsp freshly squeezed lemon juice
4. Grated zest of 2 lemons
5. Black food colouring (a paste not a liquid!)

Decoration and filling

1. 4 tblsp lemon curd
2. 2 colours of ready-to roll icing
3. Black sherbert (optional)
4. Edible silver balls
5. Coloured sugar strands

Method:

1. Preheat oven to 160C/350F/GM4.
2. Line a 12 hole muffin tin with cupcake cases.
3. In a large mixing bowl, cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy this will take at least 5 minutes with an electric hand mixer – don’t rush this stage).
4. Add the eggs, one at a time, mixing for a few minutes after each addition. It should result in a lovely light mousse-like mixture.
5. Combine the two flours in a separate bowl.
6. Combine the milk, sour cream and lemon juice in a jug.
7. Add one third of the flours to the creamed mixture and stir gently to combine.
8. Pour in one third of the milk mixture and stir gently.
9. Continue to add flours and then milk mixture alternately, stirring gently after each addition, until all have been added.
10. Gently stir in lemon zest.
11. Spoon mixture into the cupcake cases, filling to about 2/3 full.
12. Bake in the oven for about 30 minutes until lightly golden brown. The cakes will spring back lightly when touched, if cooked.
13. Remove from the oven and leave to cool in tin for about 10 minutes, before carefully placing on a wire rack to finish cooling.

While the cakes are in the oven, make up the buttercream:

1. In a large mixing bowl, beat the butter, juice, zest and half of the icing sugar until smooth.
2. Add the rest of the icing sugar and beat until smooth and creamy, but slightly stiffer than you would generally aim for when piping, to allow for the amount of colour you will need to add.
3. Colour the icing with black food colouring.

To fill and decorate:

1. Once cakes are cooked and cooled, use a tea spoon to cut a cone out from the centre of the cakes.
2. Cut the top disk off each cone and retain.
3. Fill the hole in each cake with a teaspoon of lemon curd and then replace a cake disk onto each cake to seal the hole.
4. Place buttercream into an icing bag with a star shaped nozzle (I use the Wilton 1M nozzle). Swirl onto cupcakes.
5. Sprinkle sherbert over cakes (if using).
6. Roll out each colour of ready-to-roll icing to about 2-3mm thick.
7. Use star shaped plunger cutters to stamp out stars and arrange on cakes.
8. Sprinkle silver balls and sugar strands on cakes.   

Halloween Lemon Layer Cake

So second cake for my contribution to the Friday meeting (why is it that I am seemingly incapable of keeping things simple and just making the one cake?!) was a Primrose Bakery Lemon Layer Cake. I’ve made this once before and it was absolutely beautiful and went down a storm. It is deliciously lemony and moist.

The recipe is from the “Cupcakes from the Primrose Bakery” book – which is my absolute “go to” book for cupcakes – however their recipe is for a two layer sponge, I have multiplied it to make a three layer sponge. Rather than filling and topping the sponge with lemon buttercream, I fill it with lemon curd and then cover with the lemon buttercream. They do suggest that you can make it as an all-in-one recipe, but I’m more of a traditionalist and prefer to do the long version of creaming the butter and sugar, etc.

I think I slightly overcooked it on this occasion as it ended up slightly drier than last time, although still delicious. I think you need to pull it out of the oven when it is just slightly golden rather than any darker.

Lemon Layer Cake

Ingredients

1. 340g golden caster sugar
2. 340g self-raising flour
3. 2 ¼ tsp baking powder
4. 40g cornflour
5. 340g butter, at room temperature
6. 6 large eggs
7. Grated zest and juice of 3 large lemons (or 4 smaller lemons)

Lemon buttercream icing

1. 110g butter, at room temperature
2. Grated zest of 2 lemons
3. 500g icing sugar
4. Juice of 1-2 lemons

To fill and decorate

1. Approx 6 tblsp lemon curd
2. 500g ready-to-roll icing
3. 100g royal icing sugar

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 170C.
2. Grease and baseline 3 20cm loose-base cake tins
3. Cream the butter and sugar using an electric hand mixer, or stand mixer, until the mixture is pale and smooth.
4. Add the eggs, 1 or 2 at a time, mixing for a few minutes after each addition.
5. Combine the dry ingredients in a bowl and then add to the main bowl (best done in 2 or 3 lots). Mix gently after each addition.
6. Add the grated zest and juice and mix gently to get a smooth mixture.
7. Divide the mixture evenly between the three tins.
8. Bake in the pre-heated oven for 25-30 minutes until raised and golden. The cakes should spring back when touched lightly.
9. Remove from oven and leave the cakes to cool in their tins for 10 minutes.
10. Turn cakes out onto a wire rack and peel the parchment from the bases of the cakes.
11. Leave to cool.

To make the buttercream icing:

1. In a large mixing bowl, beat the butter, zest, juice of 1 lemon and half of the icing sugar until smooth.
2. Add the rest of the icing sugar and beat until smooth and creamy.
3. Add extra juice, if required to get the correct consistency. Beat until smooth.

To assemble

1. Place the first cake onto your plate / stand.
2. Spread 3 tablespoons of lemon curd on top of the first cake and another 3 on a second cake.
3. Carefully place the second cake on top of the first cake.
4. Place the third cake on top of the others.
5. Use a palette knife to spread the buttercream icing evenly all over the cake: start by covering the top and then smooth the icing down the sides of the cake. 
6. Roll the ready-to-roll icing out on a sheet of parchment until it is large enough to cover the cake.
7. Lift the parchment and gently lower the icing over the cake. Smooth and trim to fit.
8. Make up royal icing according to instructions on pack. It needs to be a toothpaste-like consistency.
9. Place royal icing into a piping bag and pipe as desired onto the cake.