As many of you may know, I often make cupcakes or muffins on a Saturday morning to take to work with me. Saturdays can be busy and hectic. I rather like being able to offer customers looking at stoves a coffee and a cake as they browse - it keeps things a little more relaxed for everyone !
This is an older Good Housekeeping recipe that I decided to make and adapt a little today.
It had interesting and mixed results....
I like the concept - but in my opinion although it's ok, it would benefit from a little more tweaking. In their recipe, there was just sprinkles on the top. A glace cherry would look good.
However, I had some end of season Sweet Heart cherries in the fridge. American imported. Beautiful big purpley cherries and unfortunately probably the last fresh cherries I'll buy this year. I decided to dip them into some white candy melt.... Had I had more time, I would have rather used white chocolate.... but 1.1/2 hours to prepare, bake and ice before work really isn't that long to turnaround a batch of cupcakes !
Stupidly, I put these directly on to a baking tray to harden. I should have put them on a silicone baking sheet, as they would have lifted straight off. Unfortunately it was a rather mad rush - and my brain was still in bed :embarassed: I ended up having to knock the cherries off the sheet. Didn't matter so much as the bare bottoms were getting stuck into some icing on top of the cakes anyway !
I decided to use some of our really pretty new muffin / cupcake cases inside a pink silicone bakeware muffin mould. If I'm not icing muffins / cupcakes, I tend just to grease and flour the insides and not bother with paper cases. However for handling and hygiene reasons - I like to use paper baking cake liners when icing.
We've got some really cute paper cake cases in now and loads more designs to come. Current sizes are standard (50mm base diameter) and mini ones to fit our 24 cell mini muffin / cupcake tray molds . We also have a large range of colours in American Jumbo size paper cases in stock - but I've still to get these online.
Recipe - makes 12
6oz self raising flour
6 oz butter
6oz sugar1tsp baking powder
3 eggs
3 oz ground almonds
3 oz glace cherrries - chopped
Cream butter and sugar until pale. Add eggs one at a time and beat to combine. Sift in flour and almonds and baking powder and fold these in (with chopped cherries) using a metal spoon.
Cook in a fan oven at approx 170deg for around 20 minutes
Allow to cool in the silicone mould for about 5 mins before tranferring to a rack to cool totally.
Whilst cooling, prepare the icing.
Beat 50g of butter until pale. To that, I added 1 small tub ready made Ambrosia Devon Custard and icing sugar. Combined with the mixer and beat until pale and desired thickness is achieved.
After icing, I put the newly iced cakes back into the silicone mould so I could put the whole lot in the car to go to work...
The dipped cherry on the top worked. The icing worked. The cake was passable. Next time, I'd use the same recipe as for the financiers instead of the cake batter above.... No sponge cake compares since making friands and financiers !
The purple spotty cupcake cases worked best with the deep purpley cherries.
Sarah-Jane Nash - http://www.siliconemoulds.com/ - silicone bakeware cook shop August 2010
Great! They look delicious and love those cupcake cases!
ReplyDeletehad a sample this morning - yummy so made some this afternoon. Had to modify the icing as had no custard - I mixed some fondant icing instead and some vanilla essence - easy to make and the cakes are great.
ReplyDeletewow pretty cupcakes, lovely colours of cupcake tins and cheery click is awesome :)
ReplyDeletePam - the paper cases are really cute aren't they. We've got mini ones in hot pink too and I'm lookiong forward to getting bigger ones in the same colour.
ReplyDeleteBev - glad you liked the ones I dropped in with the eggs this morning. Wish you had said you were going to make them as I made way too much icing and there is stacks left !
Ananda - thanks. I had a much better photos of the cherries until I found there was a big bug sat on top of one of them in the photo ..... oops !
Your Cherry bakewell cupcakes look delicious. I'm loving the mould, it's pink and girly- just what I like.
ReplyDeleteHave a great week ahead!
Oh I know these are simply delicious Sarah Jane because of the ground almonds in them. Ill try this recipe for sure. Ive been so busy I havent had time to comment....ill have to take some time off n put it on the comp..:)))
ReplyDeleteOh teh cupcake cases are so very sweet n girly indeed. exactly what a I love :)
ReplyDeleteHey Zurin
ReplyDeleteThese were not too bad - but not nearly so nice as financiers / friands !
They look adorable to me. Like the presentation of the cherry on top with the stem.
ReplyDelete