Marmalade cupcakes

I'm back in England, and it has greeted me with lots and lots of rain. There was due to be a gathering of all the churches in Leamington today in the park, but it had to be moved indoors. It was fun to do church with about 1000 other people. 

I read a book while I was away called 'Meet Me At the Cupcake Cafe', about someone who, oddly enough, set up a cupcake cafe. This makes me want to set up a cupcake cafe!!! The storyline goes that she was brought up by her Grandfather, a baker, and loves making cakes. When she gets made redundant she decides to use the money to set up this shop. 

One of my favourite things about this book is that it is punctuated by recipes. I'd been away for 3 days and not baked anything, so I was well overdue a batch of cakes. I decided to try making the 'orange cupcakes with marmalade icing'. Unfortunately the Swiss aren't really into marmalade, but the cakes are surprisingly marmalade-y anyway, and are a really lovely orange colour too!

Here's her instructions - and then what I'd do next time ;) I will say, though, that I was using Swiss ingredients, which definitely aren't the same. Seriously, very confusing, there are about 4 different times of sugar!

2 whole oranges, 

8oz butter, (she says melted, but next time I'd do a diff method so wouldn't melt it)

3 eggs

8 oz sugar (soft brown or golden caster gives this a good flavour)

8 oz self-raising flour

3 tbsp marmalade

3 tbsp orange zest

Preheat oven to gas mark 4/170C

1. Chop one orange - skin and all (try to make sure you get all the pips out!) into chunks and place in the mixer with the melted butter, eggs and sugar. Mix on high until well combined. (Next time I make these I think I will beat together the butter and sugar, beat in the orange (previously blended) and then fold in the flour.) 

 - I tried using my mum's kenwood mixer at this point as it said 'mixer'. However, this had no effect on the orange chunks, as you can see below. So I decided to try my mum's hand held blender-thing which produced this lovely effect! 

After the Kenwood

After the blender...

2. Add flour and mix together. You get a fairly thin batter.

3. She says bake in the oven for 50 minutes, but that wouldn't work unless it was one big cake, and the title says cupcakes…. so, I baked them for 12-15 mins!

4. Wait until they're cool and spread with marmalade. (As mentioned before I had no marmalade, so I made butter icing and added orange zest and orange juice to it :))

For orange butter icing:

I used 125g of butter for 24 cupcakes and have loads left over

Some icing sugar (usually at least twice the weight of butter you've used

A splash of orange juice

A splash of milk

1. Use real butter, it tastes so much better! 

2. Beat it with the orange zest until it's smooth and creamy, 

3. Gradually add the icing sugar (especially if you're using a mixer so you don't make everything white!)

4. Add a bit of orange juice, and milk to get the correct consistency.

5. Keep adding everything of the above until it tastes how you want. 

Again let me know if you ever make anything on the blog and let me know how it turns out! :)