So I haven’t posted a baking blog in a while, which is
unusual for me. But to be honest life has been pretty hectic and with me
starting a new job and a lot of personal stuff happening, baking and blogging
had to take a step back. As life is starting to calm down a little (Mission:
Look after myself a little better!) I spend last Sunday in the kitchen baking
cupcakes and Kiss biscuits (blog to follow soon, promise!).
My love of elderflower has had me to be dreaming about
making cupcakes with elderflower for some time now. With all the choices at
hand I decided to try a classic combination and go for apple and elderflower. A
quick search on our favourite search engine Google and I found Becky Bakewell’s recipe for spiced
apple and elderflower cupcakes!
I took her recipe and modified it slightly because I didn’t have
all the ingredients at hand and there were some bits of the recipe missing. For
example, she uses flour but never tells us how much we need, hence we
improvised and just added flour until the dough had the right consistency:
slightly running but firm enough. I would say that we added about 4 table
spoons of flour. We also added extra elderflower to maximise the taste!
Ute and I had a bit of a baking day so here is what happened
and what you will need:
- 110g butter
- 80g caster sugar
- 2 eggs
- 1 apple (diced or grated depending on your preference)
- 5 tbsp elderflower cordial
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- 1 heaped tsp all spice
- 1 heaped tsp all spice
- Plain flour
- Apple slices/chunks for decorating
How to:
- Dice or grate the apple and put to one side for now. We drizzled them with a little lemon because lemon and elderflower are great together.
- Preheat oven to 180 degrees and line tray with cake cases. Preferably pretty ones. You know how I feel about cupcakes not only tasting good but also looking pretty and pristine!
- With a spoon or electric whisk, cream the butter and sugar together until smooth. If the butter is soft enough this shouldn’t take too long.
- Add an egg at a time (and a tablespoon of flour to avoid curdling) and beat in until fully combined.
- Mix in the elderflower cordial, vanilla extract and spices. We added cinnamon according to taste.
- Sift in the flour and gently fold it in to the mixture with a spoon. As I mentioned I am not exactly sure how much flour we added but most cupcake recipes call for about 120g of plain flour. As we also added extra elderflower we judged the mixture and just kept adding flour until it was the right kind of consistency. If you are an experienced baker then this should come naturally to you, if not, maybe try and bake another recipe first (a tried and tested one such as Blackberry Sour creamed Cupcakes or Gingerbread Cupcakes)
Because I didn’t have all the ingredients the original
recipe called for I used the Hummingbird Bakery’s classic butter cream icing and
substituted the milk with cordial. Here is what you need for the icing:
- 250g icing sugar, sifted
- 80g unsalted butter, at room temperature
- 25ml elderflower cordial
- a couple of drops of vanilla extract
- Beat the icing sugar and butter together until the mixture comes together and is well mixed.
- Add the cordial and vanilla to the butter mixture a couple of tablespoons at a time.
- Continue beating until the frosting is light and fluffy, at least 5 minutes. The longer the frosting is beaten, the fluffier and lighter it becomes.
And finally: Decorate! We used yellow food
colouring to give the icing an even brighter colour, added apple slices and
coloured sugar to create the final product.
Voila: Spiced Apple and Elderflower Cupcakes
