I made these cupcakes for a friend's surprise birthday party that was yesterday. I wanted to go for something cute and pastel. And I wanted to use both the new fondant cutter set and drying roll slider that I had got. And so I came up with these. Light and moist with a vanilla buttercream topping. Only when I was icing the last batch did it strike me to add more icing sugar and see how the texture would change. Adding more icing sugar made piping the buttercream a lot better, the shape held more strongly since the buttercream was stiffer.
Here's the recipe I adapted from Magnolia's Bakery and The Hummingbird Bakery:
Yields about 55 mini cupcakes or 24 regular sized cupcakes.
Vanilla Cupcakes 1 cup butter, softened 1 and a 1/2 cups granulated sugar 4 eggs 1 and 1/2 cups self raising flour 1 and a 1/2 cups plain flour 1 cup milk 2tsp vanilla extract
Combine the flours in a bowl.
In a separate bowl, gradually add the sugar to the butter and beat until smooth and creamy. Add the eggs one at a time and beat after each addition. Add a third of the flours to the butter mixture, beat well. Follow with a third of the milk and vanilla. Repeat until all flour and milk are incorporated. Spoon into paper cases and bake at a preheated oven of 180C.
Beat the icing sugar with the butter until fully incorporated. Gradually add the milk while beating at slow speed until mixture comes together and is of the right consistency. Once all the milk has been added, increase the speed to high and beat for a couple of minutes.
To decorate, color the icing whichever colour you like. I used Wilton's gel food colouring in sky blue, creamy peach, and ivory. Use any piping tip ( I used a small and medium sized star tip) and piped a border and kept going further in until I had a little pile of icing at the top.
For the fondant decorations, color some fondant in the color of your choice by applying a little gel colouring to the fondant with a toothpick. Keep kneading the dough until the color is even throughout. Roll out on a surface lightly dusted with icing sugar and cut out shapes of your choice. If you'd like the shapes to be inverted, place them on a sloped or curved surface and allow to dry. Simply place the fondant decoration on top of the buttercream. To stick a smaller fondant decoration over a larger one (as in the picture above) use a little melted white chocolate or egg white.
CUSTARD. CAKE. MALTESERS. Enough said. But I'll say it again. CUSTARD. CAKE. MALTESERS.
Yes, this cake is THAT good. Extremely moist with a hint of custard flavor with a honey buttercream that wonderfully complements it. And what could be better than crunchy Maltesers? (Insert your preferred choices here).
This cake is a melt and mix cake. Which means, *drumroll* no mixer! Yes I am still mixer-less. I'm looking into some good mixers to buy but don't know which options to consider. Is a KitchenAid good? I've heard so much about it and seen how well it works. I'm also considering KRUPS or Kenwood. I just want a mixer whose whisks/paddle attachment reaches the bottom of the bowl to fully incorporate all the butter/sugar/whatever it is that I'm blending. What mixers are your favourite?
Ingredients: For the cake:
1 cup self-raising flour
2/3 cup custard powder
1/2 baking powder
125g unsalted butter
3/4 cup caster sugar
3 eggs, lightly beaten
1/4 cup buttermilk For the honey buttercream and topping:
60g unsalted butter
1/3 cup icing sugar
2-3 teaspoons honey
1 packet Maltesers
Procedure:
Preheat oven to 180C. Grease a 20cm cake tin, line with baking paper.
Sift flour, custard powder, and soda in large mixing bowl. Make a well in the center.
Melt the butter and sugar in a small pan over low heat, stirring until the sugar is dissolved; remove from heat.
Combine eggs and buttermilk in small mixing bowl. Add butter and egg mixtures to the dry ingredients.
Using a wooden spoon; stir until combined; do not overbeat.
Spoon mixture into prepared tin; smooth surface. Bake for 35 minutes. For the honey buttercream, beat the butter and sifted icing sugar until light and creamy. Add the honey and beat until mixture is smooth and fluffy.
Spread buttercream on top of cake with an offset palette knife and arrange Maltesers around.
Don't you LOVE getting tons of baked goodies out of only ONE batch of cake batter? I do. It allows me to get a bit extravagant in the kitchen- which I love doing.
Last week, I made one batch of my favorite vanilla batter- and managed to make 18 cupcakes and 2 cakes. A whole feast! From one batter!
And so I decided to try out different kinds of frosting.
The only frosting (or ICING) I used to make was royal icing... and although those are more for biscuits than they are for cupcakes, I'd still ice my cupcakes with them. I occasionally tried a cream cheese frosting or a dark chocolate one, but never anything more. I was on the hunt for the PERFECT frosting.
Then, last May, I came across Magnolia Bakery's cookbook (which I bought along with a cupcake) and saw a recipe for chocolate buttercream. It seemed fairly simple and so I set out to make it. It was a wonderful frosting.. light, moist, not too sweet, and not too bitter. I was so happy that I had found the "perfect frosting" that I kept on using it whenever I made cupcakes. And I mean WHENEVER... to the point that I was told outright that maybe I should consider making vanilla frosting...
And so I did.. I made Magnolia Bakery's vanilla buttercream frosting. Which ended up being the antithesis of the chocolate one. It was horrible.. It reminded me of that pink gooey like liquid that the kids are after in that Power Rangers movie I was obsessed with when I was seven...
Needless to say, I was back to my trusty chocolate buttercream frosting. But then, I wanted to experiment with colors, I wanted to try different things with my cupcakes, and so I decided that... yes, I would go on the best search ever. And find the best frosting ever. I watched YouTube videos, looked through cookbooks, and read through various food blogs until I decided to attempt two.. or maybe three.
I chose to make Hummingbird Bakery's vanilla frosting.. and their chocolate frosting... I think they were the easiest frostings I have ever made. And SOOO good. And somewhat magical, if I may say so. You first have to mix the butter and icing sugar together (with cocoa powder if you're making chocolate frosting) and when everything's mixed, you add some milk. I was a bit scared (OK fine, REALLY scared) when I saw that the butter and icing were turning into.. a powdered mess. The butter wasn't creaming and it looked NOTHING like frosting. It didn't even look like cookie batter. It looked like flour and that's it. THEN, I added the milk and within two seconds- EVERYTHING came together and became this wonderful frosting. I also.. for the first time in my life, managed to add JUST the right amount of itsy bitsy red food colouring to get that baby pink haze..
And so this is what I made with Hummingbird Bakery's vanilla frosting. (And yes, this is my attempt at photoshopping a background...)
I was inspired after watching this lovely YouTube clip on how to make icecream-like cupcakes. They seemed so easy.. and they were! It was just a bit challenging (for a frosting noob like me) to get the frosting perfect all around. And I didn't stuff the bottom of the cone with candy like the video suggested. The funniest thing about these cupcakes or ICECREAMS, whatever you want to call them, was that they fell over about twice.. and nothing happened.. hardly any icing came off as well.
The second frosting that I made was from this video by Laura Vitale. I think she's absolutely wonderful.. and I discovered her through this video.. her recipes are very simple and straightforward and she sounds extremely relaxed and friendly throughout her clips, unlike many online fooding (yes that's my word for baking and cooking) tutorial presenters.. who seem very robotic.. The frosting for this was divine. Not too sweet and with a wonderful jammy taste. I used strawberry jam.. And she is so right- the jam with the little seeds in them make the frosting look wonderful!
And finally the two cakes! I had initially planned on just layering them with some chocolate frosting in the middle and some frosting covering the entire cake but then I had SO much vanilla frosting left over that I decided to cake each cake in half (and end up with four layers), frost them in between and then frost the whole thing all around with that same vanilla frosting. Bad calculation on my part, since the vanilla frosting wasn't THAT much. It was only enough to crumb-coat the cake. The cake itself was a 5" or 6" cake and was very tiny. And a couple of cake layers were precariously leaning on the edge...
My dad was sitting in the kitchen with me when I was attempting to frost (and salvage!) the cake that he started teasing me by calling it the Leaning Tower of Pisa and telling me that it was RUINED. He even impersonated the cake and went on an impassioned speech from its point of view on how I was placing way too much burden on it .. more than it could handle. I was determined to prove that it wasn't overburdened and that the cake WOULD be salvaged so I made some chocolate frosting.
And proceeded to ice the cake. Then, I arranged some Raffaelos around it. A cute idea, but not so great with a tiny cake.. it made it look like an alien or some aquatic plankton. But it tasted wonderful- and after all that's what matters. As a good family friend always tells us- the Queen is not coming to tea!
