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. 

Mini orange, cinnamon and sultana loaf cakes

After a successful batch of mini lemon loaf cakes, I decided to try out a more adventurous recipe with my Lakeland mini loaf tin. After a search on Pinterest, I found this recipe by Laythetable – this recipe was for 6 mini loaves, using mini loaf paper cases. To use the 12 hole mini loaf tin, I doubled the ingredient quantities.

The original recipe suggested soaking the sultanas in Amaretto, which would be delicious! However, I didn’t have any Amaretto – after a rummage in our alcohol cupboard (which mostly contains gin!), the best  thing I could find to use as an alternative was Pimms! I also think Cointreau would be a great substitute if you have some! If you want to avoid alcohol entirely, you could simply use orange juice. As I did not plan my bake in advance, I only managed to soak my sultanas for about 45 minutes – this was ok and they did plump up a little, but the longer that you can soak them, the better!

The method for making the cake is fairly standard – it’s really important to beat the butter and the sugar thoroughly – at least 5 minutes in a stand mixer. When adding the beaten eggs, it should be done little by little to avoid the mixture splitting, however, if it does split, just add a little of the flour – this should bind the mixture back together.

Greasing the mini loaf tin well is really important. I really recommend a decent spray with Dr Oetker cake release spray and then rub the grease around with your fingers to ensure that every spot is covered.

The original recipe suggested finishing the cakes with a glaze followed by a drizzle, but I decided to go for a piped drizzle topped with a  sprinkling of orange zest. I have provided the methods for both so that you can choose!  

These cakes were really good – very moist and full of flavour! EHH took them into work and they were very well received – even by one colleague who claimed not to like orange cake!

Mini orange, cinnamon and sultana loaf cakes

Ingredients

1. 75g sultanas
2. Amaretto / Cointreau / Pimms / orange juice
3. 2 oranges
4. 1 tsp cinnamon
5. 1 tsp baking powder
6. 4 large eggs
7. 170g self raising flour
8. 60g ground almonds
9. 230g unsalted butter
10. 230g granulated sugar
11. 100g icing sugar

Method

1. Place the sultanas in a small bowl or cup and cover with the alcohol / orange juice. Leave to soak for as long as possible – ideally overnight or longer.
2. Strain sultanas through a sieve and reserve the liquid.
3. Preheat the oven to 180C.
4. Lightly grease the mini loaf tin (ideally spray liberally with cake release spray) or place 12 mini loaf cases on a baking tray
5. Zest one and a half of the oranges (save the remaining zest and the juice of the oranges for use in the icing).
6. Sift the flour, ground almonds, cinnamon and baking powder together.
7. Using a hand/stand mixer, cream the butter and sugar until pale, smooth and creamy.
8. Break the eggs into a bowl and whisk with a fork to combine yolks and whites. 
9. Bit by bit, add the eggs into the creamed butter and sugar, beating thoroughly between each addition.
10. Add in the sultanas and orange peel.
11. Add half of the flour mix and mix gently, then repeat with the remaining flour mix.
12. Spoon the mixture into the tin / cases evenly.
13. Use a teaspoon to smooth the tops.
14. Place in the oven for around 18 - 25 minutes. Turn the tray after about 14 minutes if your oven bakes unevenly. Towards the end of the bake, you may wish to cover with brown paper to present the tops browning before the middle is cooked.
15. Remove from the oven and allow to cool for 10 minutes before removing the cakes from the tin.
16. Place the cakes on a wire rack to finish cooling.

To glaze (while the cakes are still warm):

1. Juice one orange and mix this with a tablespoon of the soaking liqueur.
2. Place the icing sugar in a bowl and add the liquid a bit at a time until it resembles runny honey.
3. Use a skewer to make a few piercings in each cake, then spoon the glaze over each (around 2 tablespoons per cake).
4. Top each glazed cake with a sprinkle of orange zest.

To ice with a drizzle (once the cakes are cool):

1. Place the icing sugar in a bowl and add a spoonful of the soaking liqueur, followed by enough orange juice to create a smooth piping icing – it should be just a little runnier than toothpaste.
2. Spoon the icing into a piping bag with a small round nozzle and drizzle across the cakes.
3. Top each iced cake with a sprinkle of orange zest.

Hot Cross Buns

I love hot cross buns! I eat shop-bought ones all year round but, at Easter, there is something very special about home-made ones. My mum makes home-made hot cross buns every Easter and it is something that I have really missed for the last couple of years, so this year, I decided it was time to learn to make my own.

I started practising a couple of weeks ago when I attempted a “quick and easy” recipe that I found – which involved no kneading. Unfortunately, it turns out that “quick and easy” doesn’t really work! Or not when I tried anyway! Although the resulting buns had a nice flavour, they didn’t really rise at were very stodgy! Next attempt was in the bread-maker, which is really EHH’s realm! He followed the recipe in the book which came with the bread-maker. These buns were ok, but were fairly bland and missing the nice spicy hit that I like in hot cross buns. They also didn’t have quite the right home-made feel to them.

So Good Friday arrived and I decided that there really isn’t a shortcut to proper tasty home-made hot cross buns. I went with the recipe in last month’s Good Food magazine – the recipe was actually for a bun ring but worked fine just as normal buns. I added extra spice and lemon zest as I like my hot cross buns with lots of flavour! I actually enjoyed working the dough and the satisfaction of these rising beautifully and tasting fab definitely made all the work worthwhile.  My buns were not beautifully round – I think I need to work on my shaping, but they were light and fluffy and tasted great! If I were to make them  again, I think I would try brushing them with a spicy sugar syrup straight after baking – this was suggested in the quick and  easy version that I tried, and would be great on these buns!

Hot Cross Buns

Ingredients

1. 300ml whole milk
2. Zest of one orange
3. Zest of one lemon
4. 50g butter
5. 500g strong white bread flour, plus 140g for the crosses, plus extra for dusting
6. 1.5 tsp cinnamon
7. 1.5 tsp mixed spice
8. 1 tsp salt
9. 85g golden caster sugar
10. 7g sachet fast-action yeast
11. 1 large egg, beaten, plus 1 egg to blaze
12. Oil / cake-release spray, for greasing
13. 100g mixed fruit

Method

1. Warm the milk and zests in a small saucepan until steaming.
2. Remove from the heat and add the butter, gently stirring until the butter has melted and the milk has cooled to hand temperature.
3. Mix the flour, spices, sugar, yeast and salt in a large bowl (make sure that you don’t put the salt directly on top of the yeast).
4. Pour in the milk mixture and the beaten egg, and mix together with a wooden spoon until the mixture clumps together.
5. Tip onto a floured work surface and knead until smooth and elastic – the dough should bounce back when pressed with your finger.
6. Transfer to a clean oiled bowl (I use a quick spray of cake release spray to coat the bowl) and cover with cling film or a tea towel. Leave somewhere warm for about 2 hours or until doubled in size (If your house is cool, place in an oven at about 30C).
7. Line two baking trays with baking parchment and dust with flour.
8. Tip the dough out of the bowl onto a work surface dusted with flour and knead to knock out any air bubbles.
9. Add the dried fruit and knead to incorporate.
10. Divide the dough into 12 pieces, roll each piece into a ball and place 6 on each baking tray, spacing evenly.
11. Cover loosely with oiled clingfilm (again, cake release spray makes this easy!) and leave somewhere warm for about an hour, or until doubled in size.
12. Heat the oven to 180C.
13. Brush the buns with a little beaten egg.
14. Mix the remaining flour with enough water to make a thick paste and then transfer to a piping bag.
15. Use the paste to pipe a cross on each bun.
16. Place the trays in the oven and bake for about 25 minutes, until golden and cooked through.

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.