Lemon & Elderflower Cupcakes

Todays recipe is adapted from my new favourite cupcake book, Eat Me!: The Stupendous, Self-raising World of Cupcakes and Bakes According to Cookie Girl. I like this one because it has cute, vintage inspired piccies, and the recipes are really unusual.

The icing on this cake was a very thin icing sugar, water and elderflower mixture. I decided to try a more fluffy frosting. This wasn't very successful to be honest - it was very runny, and had no taste of elderflower at all, despite trebling the quantities of elderflower stated in the original recipe. I have included the original icing recipe for the icing as I can't really see any way to make a thick frosting have an elderflower taste as either the butter or cream cheese completely overpowers it.

The lemon cake however was brilliant, the texture was really light and fluffy. The lemon taste was very mild however, so I have upped this a bit in the recipe below.

Ingredients

200g plain flour
2 tsp baking powder
225g granulated sugar
45g ground almonds
grated zest of 2 lemons
2 eggs
90ml sunflower oil
250ml low fat yoghurt
1/2 tbsp lemon essence
225g icing sugar
1 tsp elderflower cordial
4 tsp water

• Heat oven to 180C and line a muffin tray with 12 cases
• Sift flour and baking powder into a large bowl. Add the sugar, almonds and grated lemon zest and mix.
• In a seperate bowl beat the eggs with the oil and yoghurt. Add the lemon essence. 
• Pour the wet ingredients into the dry and stir  until everything is smooth and combined. 
• Spoon evenly into the paper cases no more than 2/3 full (it rises a lot!) and bake for 20 minutes until a skewer placed in the centre comes out clean. 
• Place cupcakes on a wire rack to cool.
• Sift the icing sugar into a bowl and add the elderflower cordial. Add the water a little at a time to make a thick icing. 
• When the cupcakes are cool spoon a tablespoon of icing onto each one and spread evenly.

Lemon Cake with White Chocolate Icing

Yesterday morning I returned from the doctors (who still didn't have my results!) and decided to make a cake. Lemon cakes have always been a bit of a bane of mine, mainly because my mum is so good at them. 

The recipe calls for a loaf tin, however I used a shallow half sandwich cake tin instead. It is worth noting this is a small recipe, and only makes a cake with 6-8 small slices, making it perfect for Sunday tea but terrible for feeding a group.

White chocolate has long been another fear of mine, it just doesn't react like milk and dark chocolate. Melting in a bain marie causes it to become a congealed, gooey mess. However the recipe uses a neat trick as you will see, although I did find I needed to use at least another 50ml of cream to get even close to covering the chocolate, and even then it cooled too quickly so I had to give the whole mixture 20 seconds in the microwave to finish it off.

The finished cake was very flat, but still light and fluffy, and had a very sharp lemon taste which contrasted really well with the rich white icing. I'm not sure if the recipe makes a mistake and should call for self raising flour rather than plain, might be worth a try sometime. I was dissapointed that my icing looked like normal fondant icing rather than rich frosting style icing, I'm not sure if this is because of the type of chocolate used (Went all out with Tesco Finest Madagascan Vanilla white chocolate), or that I had to use more cream than the recipe stated.

Overall the result was a success, and everyone made those reassuring 'mmm' noises, although it didn't completely bowl me over. Probably a 7/10. 

Lemon cake with white chocolate icing

65g unsalted butter

135g golden caster sugar

2 eggs

135g plain flour

1 1/2 tsp baking powder

zest & juice of 2 lemons

Icing:

150g white chocolate broken up (plus extra to decorate)

75ml (quite probably a bit more) double cream

17 x 9cm loaf tin, or a small cake tin

• Preheat oven to 170C/Gas 3
• Put the butter and sugar in a bowl and beat well with an electric whisk. 
• Add the eggs and whisk for a few minutes until pale and fluffy. 
• Fold in the flower and baking powder with a metal spoon. 
• Stir in the lemon juice and zest and stir until well mixed.
• Pour the mixture into the greased or lined tin and bake for 25 minutes until golden. 
• Remove from the oven and place on a cooling rack to cool. 
• Put the broken chocolate in a mixing bowl. 
• Put the cream in a saucepan and heat gently, stirring frequently until boiling. 
• Pour into the mixing bowl over the chocolate and beat with a whisk until evenly blended. 
• Put in the fridge for 15 minutes to stiffen. 
• Spread the icing evenly over the cake and decorate with grated chocolate.