Cupcakes!

Strawberries and Cream

Chocolate and Coffee

Last weekend I felt like doing some baking to take into work for my workmates so I thought I would make some cupcakes since I hadn't really made any since I made so many for our wedding! Also I found these cupcake carriers at Poundland which are awesome, I wish we had them in New Zealand, they are super useful.

I made two flavours of cupcakes, one was strawberries and cream, where the cupcake has strawberries in and cream on top instead of icing. The other one I made was a chocolate cupcake with coffee icing.

The basic recipe is super easy, and you can just add what you want, like lemon, strawberry, cocoa or whatever to make the different flavoured cupcakes. Usually I would use fresh strawberries but I couldn't find any on the day I was making the cupcakes so I used canned strawberries which still worked out well.

The basic recipe is just 100g of butter, 3/4 cup of sugar, a little vanilla, 2 eggs, 1 cup of flour, 1 teaspoon of baking powder and 1/2 a cup of milk. Then I would just add half a punnet of chopped strawberries, a couple of tablespoons of cocoa or jam, basically whatever you feel like flavouring the cupcakes with.

You just need to cream the butter and sugar, mix in the eggs and then add the other ingredients and mix them in. I would bake them in the oven at 180 degrees Celsius, I think it was gas mark 4 but I'm not totally sure. I didn't time how long they took to cook but you can tell by touching the top and seeing if it springs back or not.

After the cupcakes have cooked and cooled you can ice them. I put just cream whipped with some vanilla essence and icing sugar (about two tablespoons) on the top of the strawberry cupcakes, and then swirled some strawberry icing on.

For the chocolate cupcakes I made coffee buttercream which is basically just heaps of butter whipped with icing sugar added, and a couple of tablespoons of strong coffee. I don't have a recipe for this, I just whip the butter then add the coffee and whip it more, then add icing sugar until it seems like the right consistency. I topped it with some chocolate curls as well.

Quentin ate about 4 cupcakes that night which was a good sign, and my workmates and flatmates liked them as well, yay! It was good to do some baking again since I haven't done any for ages, and it is nice to have people to bake for! I might make some chocolate brownies this weekend which should be tasty.