Jude’s birthday cupcakes

Shonky phone photo I’m afraid. Here are the cupcakes we made for Jude’s birthday. (Plus some supermarket interlopers. Hmph.)

Ours are the yellow ones with a mini-egg (lemon), the ones with white icing and dark chocolate gratings, and the ones with pink icing with white chocolate gratings (these latter two are all chocolate/”red velvet”).

For the lemon ones, I risked another Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook recipe. I feel pretty certain the quantity of baking powder in the Black bottom cupcakes is wrong now. Most of the Hummingbird cupcake recipes have similar quantities of butter, sugar, flour (40g, 140g, 120g ish), and all have 1 and half teaspoons of baking powder – except the black bottom, which has half a teaspoon. Duh.

Anyway, the lemon ones – the method is of course a shambles for the home kitchen, but the results are good with some tweaking.

Soften 40g unsalted butter, then blend it into 140g of caster sugar. You won’t be able to cream it per se, as there’s not enough fat in proportion to sugar. Add 1 egg and 120ml of whole milk and beat – you can do this with a handheld electric mixer. Sift in 150g of flour and 1 and half teaspoons of baking powder, and beat slowly by hand to stop the powdery ingredients spraying all over the shop. Once it’s all combined and moist, hit it with the mixer again to blend nicely.

Another flaw with the Hummingbird recipes is they all say “spoon the mixture into paper cases until two-thirds full”, then claim they’ll make 12. Well, if you use standard muffin cases, and fill them 2/3rds, they actually make 8. Bake for 20 mins in oven pre-heated to 170C.

For the “red velvet” ones we used a recipe Fran found online a while back, and previously posted here. Here’s a tweaked version of the recipe, to make 12:
Soften 60g of unsalted butter then mix with 140g caster sugar; again, you can’t quite cream it, but blend. Then beat in 1 egg, using handheld mixer.
In a separate bowl, sift together:
145g plain flour
1/2 t baking soda
1/2 t baking powder
Pinch salt
1/2 T cocoa powder
Then in another bowl, or jug, mix:
120ml buttermilk
1 1/2 T red food colouring (natural, naturally)
1/2 t vanilla essence
1/2 t distilled white vinegar

Add quarter of the dry ingredients to the beaten butter/sugar/egg mix, and beat; then add a third of the wet ingredients and beat. Keep adding alternatively, ending with the dry mix. Beat until well combined.

Half fix 12 muffin cases, then bake for 20 mins at 170C, or until the cakes are springy.

We iced all the cakes with variations of cream-cheese icing, using 300g of icing sugar, sifted; 50g of unsalted butter, softened; 125g of cream cheese.
Add around 100g of the sugar to the butter, and slowly beat in by hand, until well combined, then add more sugar a little at a time; add the cheese, and blend by hand until the powder is no longer powdery. Then beat with electric mix until well combined. For lemon, we added some zest and yellow colouring.

(Another, slightly sharper, pic here.)