Lemon and passion fruit cupcakes

As I was headed back home to Guernsey (affectionately known as the Rock) for the week and it was one of my oldest friend’s birthdays, I felt that I should make some cupcakes to take with me.  During a visit to our local garden centre (I know, I’m sooo middle-aged!), I found a delicious-sounding jar of passion fruit curd. I absolutely love passion fruit and so decided to give it a try.  I wasn’t sure about adding curd into a standard cupcake recipe and so decided to use it as a filling in lemon cupcakes. I followed my standard lemon cupcake recipe, simply replacing the lemon curd with the passion fruit curd.  If I had also found some fresh passion fruit, I’d have strained the juice to make passion fruit buttercream, but, as I didn’t, I stuck with lemon buttercream.

This curd is delicious and worked brilliantly with the lemon cupcakes – they even got my dad’s seal of approval!

 

I wanted to create some fairly bright and modern cupcakes and so decided on a fairly bright pink, blue and white colour scheme.  I also wanted to use my “Live, Laugh, Love” embosser (from this set) and so started with these. The flower-covered cakes were a nice, simple design to do and I decided to do the last two cupcakes with a patchwork covering (for instructions on how to do the patchwork decoration – see this blogpost).   

The photos aren’t that good this time as they were taken rather hurriedly while waiting for the taxi to arrive to take me to the airport! But overall, I was fairly pleased with how these cakes turned out. They did get a little squashed on the plane journey over to Guernsey but they just about survived in a respectable condition!

Honey and lemon cupcakes

Having made Hummingbird cupcakes for the netball girls to celebrate my birthday, next step was to decide on cakes to take to work. I decided to take my actual birthday as leave, so decided to take cakes in the following Monday – which gave me the weekend to prepare! As there are quite a few people to cater for, I decided to chuck together another Sticky Ginger Cake, as I’ve made it before for work and it has gone down really well. Next, I felt that it was expected that I produce cupcakes of some kind, so decided to have another go at the Honey and Lemon cupcakes that I made recently. Finally, I decided to make some simple lemon finger biscuits – will write these up in the next blog post. 

The honey and lemon cupcakes were inspired by Martha Kearney on Great British Bake Off for Comic Relief and last time I made them, I had a go at copying her Beehive style decoration. Although they tasted delicious, I wasn’t that satisfied with the overall appearance and they were very fiddly to decorate so I decided to have go with a slightly different design for the cupcakes this time. 

I was mainly happy with the overall design of these cupcakes this time – although I’m not sure the actual beehives looked quite right. I started by swirling the buttercream onto the cupcake with a large round nozzle (mine is from this set). If I were to do again, I may try using the same nozzle but instead of simple piping a swirl, building dots of icing one on top of another – this may create a better beehive. I then coloured the buttercream with green colour paste and used one of these piping nozzles (although I got mine in a set like this one from Lakeland - incredibly useful!) to pipe on the grass. 

Finally, I decorated the cupcakes with bees and flowers made from ready-to-roll icing.

The bees are actually quite fiddly to make but worth the effort:

1. Start by rolling a small cone shape of yellow ready-to-roll icing. 
2. Roll out black ready-to-roll icing on a surface lightly dusted with icing sugar - it will need to be very thin. 
3. Cut into very thin strips. 
4. Dip a clean paintbrush in water and lightly run over your yellow cone. 
5. Stick two strips of the black icing onto the cone to create your bee's stripes. 
6. Use a sharp knife to make two small incisions on the back of your bee. 
7. Find two similarly sized pieces of sliced almond and dip one tip of each piece in water.
8. Insert the dampened tips into the incisions created in the bee - this will be your bee's wings. 
9. Use a black food colouring pen to add eyes.