how to bake and blog about your Easter cupcakes

For Easter this year I made some vanilla cupcakes decorated with chocolate mini eggs. Nothing groundbreaking, but very satisfying and tasty. 

As vanilla cupcakes are probably the most blogged creation on the planet and I was baking these during the day in good light instead of the evening, I thought I'd write up a different style of blog post: a fun and silly What Do You Make Of My Cake "how to" special!

First, find all your ingredients and artfully arrange them around some daffodils/narcissus/lilies. It's Spring after all!

Take an action shot of yourself pouring, whipping or mixing. You're not a real food blogger unless you do that. Brownie points (mmmm brownies...) if you're handling a DSLR camera one handed.

Photograph your cupcakes before they go into the oven. Show everybody how luscious your cake batter looks. Don't show them your finger dipped in the batter. Nobody needs to see you greedily scraping the bowl like a child.

Whilst your cupcakes are in the oven, take a seat and have a cuppa. And a custard cream.

And marvel at your ability to accidently colour coordinate with your pinny. As the cool kids would say, Like. A. Boss.

Take your cupcakes out the oven and let them cool on a wire rack. Admire your awesome choice of cupcake cases.

Mix together your icing of choice (making sure you create a sufficient mess in the kitchen with the icing sugar) and pipe on some bad ass swirls with a Wilton 1M tip. Only the best cake bloggers use 1M tips ;)

Decorate your beautiful cupcakes with edible butterfies, pink sprinkles and mini eggs. Mini eggs are compulsory as it's Easter and you cannot blog an Easter bake without them.

Take an artsy photograph from a jaunty angle. Ooh yeah!

And for your Easter cupcake blog post you must also include at least one photograph with a little fluffy chick, kitsch bunny ornament or an adorable chicken basket. I've opted for the chicken basket. Awwww!

And finally, eat a cupcake! You've worked hard baking them, so you deserve it. Don't forget to take a cross section photograph though. You want to show off that fluffy texture.

And that's it! 

On a more serious note, this was the first time I have ever used vanilla bean paste (ooh I'm turning fancy!) and I really liked it. I wasn't sure how much I should add to the mixture, as it seemed pretty potent, so feel free to add more if you really want a punchy vanilla flavour as mine was quite subtle. I really like that you can see flecks of vanilla bean running through the batter and icing.

I've also come to the conclusion that I prefer the flavour of slightly salted butter in my icing. I know the majority of recipes say to use unsalted, but personally I find it a bit bland. What do you use in your icing? Am I an unhealthy rebel?

Vanilla cupcakes

I used the classic sponge method of weighing out my butter, sugar and flour to the same weight as my eggs.

5oz/ 140g golden caster sugar

5oz/ 140g margarine/butter (I used Stork)

2 large eggs

1/2 tsp vanilla bean paste

1 tbsp milk

5oz/ 140g self-raising flour

icing (Hummingbird Bakery's vanilla frosting):

250g icing sugar

80g softened butter

25ml milk

1/4 - 1/2 tsp vanilla bean paste

Preheat the oven to Gas 4 and line a 12 hole cupcake tray with cases. Beat together the margarine and sugar for roughly 5 minutes until light and fluffy in texture. Add the eggs one at a time, adding a tablespoon of the flour if the mixture starts to curdle. Tip in the rest of the flour along with the milk and vanilla and mix until everything is just combined. Divide the mixture between the cupcake cases, filling them until they're roughly 2/3 full. Bake on the middle shelf of the oven for 20-25 minutes until well risen, golden and springy to touch. Leave them in their trays for a few minutes before turning them out onto a wire rack to finish cooling. 

To make the icing, tip all the icing ingredients into a bowl and mix together for a good 5 minutes until light, fluffy and smooth. Once the cupcakes are cool you can either pipe your icing on using a bag and nozzle or spread on with a palette knife.

Since I'm having fun with my Easter post today I thought I'd send it over to this month's Easter themed Calendar Cakes Challenge hosted by Dollybakes. Feel free to join in with the fun!

Spooky blackberry and white chocolate cupcakes

There was some left over white chocolate icing from my birthday cake in the freezer so I thought I'd use it for a Hallowe'en bake: white chocolate buttercream ghosties on a sponge with a gory blackberry centre.

 

I love the little ghostie faces, they were fun to paint on. I'm always slightly apprehensive about using the circular nozzle for piping icing on cupcakes because, well, they can look a bit like *whisper* poo, but I hope the ghost faces stop anyone else from thinking that.

 

 

Although not bad, I wasn't 100% happy with my sponge. I think they could have been fluffier. I used my usual recipe but decided to add 4 mashed blackberries to the batter (as well as a whole blackberry inside each cupcake) but the batter looked too wet so I added a little extra flour. Perhaps I ended up over mixing, or maybe it was the addition of the pureed blackberries, but they didn't turn out the way they usually do. Strangely they tasted much better the second day.

 

This is my favourite photograph. "Oh no don't eat me!"
 

I've also decided to enter my cupcakes into this month's Hallowe'en themed Calendar Cakes hosted by Dollybakes. Calendar Cakes is a baking challenge alternately hosted by Rachel from Dollybakes and Laura from Lauralovescake with a different theme set at the start of each month. I've never taken part in any of the baking challenges, I'm not really sure why, but I'm doing it this month! The closing date is on Wednesday so there's still time to enter if you fancy joining in with the fun.

 

Blackberry and white chocolate cupcakes

I used the equal weight method. My three eggs weighed 6oz (about 170g, sorry but my brain is naturally programmed to Imperial measurements) so this is what I used:
 

6oz caster sugar

6oz Stork margarine

6oz eggs, lightly beaten

6oz self-raising flour

a packet of blackberries
 

Preheat the oven to 180C/Gas 4 and line a muffin tin with cases. Cream the fat and sugar for about five minutes until light and fluffy. Add the eggs along with a little of the flour to prevent curdling then add the rest of the flour in one go along with 4 mashed blackberries and mix until just incorporated. (At this point I added a little extra flour as the mixture looked a bit too wet.) Put a good teaspoon full of the batter into each case and plop a blackberry on top. Fill the cases until 3/4 full with the remaining batter, covering the blackberry. Pop the tray in the centre of the oven for 20-25 minutes until lightly golden and firm to touch. Cool in the tin for a few minutes before transferring to a wire rack to finish cooling. I found my mixture made 13 large cupcakes (yes, annoyingly I needed an extra tin for one cupcake) but it depends what size you want them.

 

 

Unfortunately I don't have a recipe for the icing as it was my mum that originally made it and she just mixed to taste. It's basically a bog standard butter icing mixed with a block of melted white chocolate. If you make too much (like she did) you can always freeze left overs. It defrosted and whisked up beautifully.