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!

Baby Shower Cupcakes

As mentioned in my previous post on Chocolate and Cherry Cupcakes, I’d been asked by a colleague to make 12 cupcakes for her daughter-in-law’s baby shower.  A quick consultation with my colleague confirmed that the baby’s gender wasn’t yet known, so the cakes needed to be gender-neutral, and the theming of the baby shower was fairly bright pastels.  I spent lots of time on Flickr doing searches for baby cupcakes, christening cupcakes, baby shower cakes, etc, created a Flickr gallery of my favourites and then, after lots of inspiration, sketched out a design for the 12 cupcakes.  

First, I made the lemon cupcakes – using my usual recipe. Except, annoyingly, I forgot to fill them with curd! I was so worried about getting the decoration right that I completely forgot the filling stage and by the time I remembered, it was too late! Never mind – I’m sure they’ll taste ok anyway. 

Having had a practise at making chocolate cupcakes last week, it was finally time to make them. After deliberating, I decided to just make plain chocolate rather than chocolate and cherry. My preference would be the chocolate and cherry, however, I was asked for chocolate and decided to stick with that. Batch One was a disaster! Why do things always go wrong when you are baking for something special?! Everything went fine until I was measuring out the flour, baking powder and bicarbonate of soda. Having done all the measuring and mixed it all together, I realised that I had grabbed my half tablespoon measuring spoon instead of my teaspoon measuring spoon.  Stupidly, I decided to carry on anyway – deciding it wouldn’t make too much difference! Big mistake! Don’t know what I was thinking – the raising agent put into a mixture is vital and too much results in the cakes rising spectacularly and then sinking once taken out of the oven. And this is exactly what happened! 

So, Batch One will be heading to EHH’s work – edible but definitely not pretty! On to Batch Two. Careful measuring out this time, with the correct spoon! The recipe says that it makes 14 but I made 16 and they still ended up spilling out of their cases slightly – so be careful how much mixture goes into each case – don’t fill much beyond half-full.  Batch Two didn’t work out quite as well as last’s week’s and sunk slightly again – not sure why – could be that doing all milk rather than a mix of milk and cherry brandy made the difference, or it could be that I didn’t quite combine the egg white with the rest of the mixture enough. I’m not sure.  I managed to find 6 respectable looking ones – which was all that I needed for the order – so that was ok.

Decorating the cakes:

 

I bought this little set of cutters online earlier this week and it has been invaluable for decorating these cakes. I have rather a huge collection of fondant cutters but I think that this set of basic shapes could be the most useful! 

I started by colouring the icing. I mixed some plain white ready-to-roll icing with small amounts of red, blue, yellow and green Renshaw icing to create some pretty bright pastel colours. (I’m not at all keen on the taste of the Renshaw icing but it is the most commonly available icing – apparently because it is the best for modelling – and it comes in a wide variety of colours.) You could just add food colouring but I find that starting with a ready coloured icing is much less messy.

To create buttons:

Roll out coloured icing to approx. 5mm thick. Use a round cutter to cut out small circles. Use a round flat item (I used the top of a plunger cutter) to push down into the circles – so creating the rim of the button. Use a skewer to create four small holes in the centre of the button.

To create the patchwork effect cupcakes:

 Roll out some white icing to form a rectangle about A5 size, approx. 2 mm thick. Roll out small amounts of each colour of icing to approximately 2 mm thick. Use a square cutter to cut out squares of each colour. Use a clean paintbrush to lightly brush over the white icing with a small amount of water. Stick the squares of coloured icing onto the white icing in a random pattern – so that they are all touching and no white can be seen (you may also want to add in some squares of white icing). 

Once the white icing has been covered, use a rolling pin to lightly and gently roll the icing again. Use a round cookie cutter (I used one with a diameter of 7.5cm) to stamp out circles. Use a suitable tool to create a stitching effect along the seams (I used the comb end of a scallop and comb tool, but you can also get a quilting tool). 

Place a large round piping tip into a piping bag and fill the bag with buttercream. Pipe onto the cupcake to create a neatly domed mound. Gently lift a patchwork circle onto the cake. Top with a icing flower and button.

To create the button cupcakes:

Roll out some coloured icing to approximately 3 mm thick. Place over an embossing mat (I used one from this set) and roll over again with a rolling pin. Gently remove from the embossing plate and use a round cookie cutter to cut out circles of embossed icing. 

Place a large round piping tip into a piping bag and fill the bag with buttercream. Pipe onto the cupcake to create a neatly domed mound. Gently lift an embossed icing circle onto the cake. Top with three buttons.

To create the baby bunting cupcakes:

Roll out some coloured icing to approximately 3 mm thick. Place over an embossing mat (I used one from this set) and roll over again with a rolling pin. Gently remove from the embossing plate and use a round cookie cutter to cut out circles of embossed icing. 

 

Place a large round piping tip into a piping bag and fill the bag with buttercream. Pipe onto the cupcake to create a neatly domed mound. Gently lift an embossed icing circle onto the cake. 

Roll out some coloured icing to approx. 2mm thick. Use a large and a small triangle cutter to cut out triangles of icing. Roll out some white icing to approx. 2mm thick. Use alphabet cutters to stamp out letters to spell “baby”. Use a little water to attach the letters to the big triangles of icing. Use a little more water to attach the big triangles to the icing-topped cupcakes. Attach little triangles onto each side of the large triangles. Roll a thin strip of white icing into a string and attach gently across the  top of the triangles.  

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.