Christmas Gingerbread Cupcakes

Christmas baking for me normally includes making gingerbread men/houses, mince pies and christmas-shaped biscuits but when I saw these cute little gingermen sprinkles I had to find a recipe to show them off which was when I came across this Gingerbread cupcakes recipe!

I've never made these before but I can honestly say it is like Christmas in a cupcake!

First cream together 150g of butter and 150g of soft brown sugar. Then mix together the spices (1 tsp ground ginger, 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon and a pinch of grated nutmeg) with 150g of self-raising flour before gradually adding it to the butter mix along with three eggs (one at a time).

Once it is all combined add 1 tbsp of milk to loosen the mixture before spooning it into 12 cupcake cases. Bake in the oven at 180c (160c fan) for 15-20 minutes until golden brown.

    

For the butter icing (which is literally like no other butter icing you've ever tasted) place 50g of butter and 50g of soft brown sugar into a pan and gently melt.

Once melted add two tablespoons of milk to the saucepan to finish off the toffee sauce and leave to cool to room tempature. In the meanwhile cream together 150g of butter and 200g of icing sugar in a seperate bowl. 

Once the sauce is cool combine it with the butter cream icing before placing it in a piping bag and piping it onto the cupcakes... and tah-dah!

More Christmas recipes to follow during December!

Trick or Treat Cookies

Halloween is the time of the year that I am able to feed my sweet addiction without raising suspicion. Last year I made these chocolate fudge spider web cupcakes and toffee apples, so I thought I’d try something different this year (although I did still make the toffee apples as they are my favourite!).

This year I tried candy-filled cookies (sounds better than sweet-filled biscuits). I’ve seen lots of different cakes recently with sweets spilling out the centre so when I saw these cute Halloween themed biscuits I had to give them a go. I couldn’t find any UK recipes online as they all had American measurements and ingredients I couldn’t get hold of. So I used this BBC food biscuit recipe and followed the instructions from this recipe.

To make the biscuits, simply cream together 250g of butter and 140g of caster sugar before adding in one egg yolk and beating. Once combined, add in the 2 tsp of vanilla essence and 300g of plain flour. 

 

 

It’s as simple as that, whether you are making these for Halloween or for another occasion you can colour the biscuit dough as you please. As you can see I used orange food colouring for my Halloween biscuits, which actually made it look like sweet potato.

I then popped the biscuit dough in the fridge to allow it to firm up to make it easier to cut the shapes out. Once it has been in the fridge for half an hour, roll it out (you want to make sure its thin as you will be stacking three biscuits on top of each other to make one biscuit – but not too thin that they'll burn) and cut your shapes. For each biscuit you will need three biscuits (two whole and one with a missing middle). To make the middle biscuit (where the sweets will hide) find a much smaller cutter, ideally a circle to cut out two circles.

Then bake for around 15 minutes. Once they have been left to cool, the fun begins! In order to stick the three biscuits together I melted white chocolate and coloured it with the same colour food colouring (other recipes suggest to use icing so its up to you). 

 

To create the cookies take a whole biscuit and pipe white chocolate around the outline of the cookie before putting the middle cookie (the one with missing middle) on top, fill the hole with sweets (I using mini chocolate beans from a baking store as m&ms and smarties were too big) and then use more white chocolate to stick the top one on.

And tah-dah!

Happy Halloween!

Smarties cookies

It has taken me years to perfect cookies, whilst they are very simple and only require a few ingredients, everyone knows they need to be gooey on the inside and crunchy on the outside. This BBC Food recipe does exactly that.

First cream together 125g of butter with 100g of light brown sugar and 125g of caster sugar. Once combined, add an egg and 1 tsp of vanilla essence. 

Then add 225g of self raising flour and a pinch of salt. The recipe suggests adding chocolate chips but smarties look and taste a lot better!

Then make walnut-sized balls and place them on a greased baking tray, make sure you leave enough room for them to expand to prevent them from making one giant cookie.

Place in the oven at 180°C for between 7-10 minutes depending on how gooey you want them to be in the middle.

These are definitely best eaten the minute they come out of the oven!

Lemon Cupcakes

These cupcakes are easy peasy lemon squeezy (excuse the pun) and take no time at all to make. The recipe is adapted from a Baking Mad orange cupcake recipe to make lemon cupcakes with a lemony frosting.

Just like any other cupcake recipe, first cream together 200g butter with 200g caster sugar until light and fluffy. Then add the zest of one lemon and the juice of half a lemon.

Once combined add in the 4 eggs - a top tip (which I must confess I found on the Baking Mad website) is to add a tablespoon of the flour to the eggs to prevent it from curdling. Then tip in the remaining 200g of self-raising flour to the mixture.

Place 24 cupcake cases into two muffin trays before spooning in the mixture. A great way to make sure all of the cake mixture is evenly distributed amongst the cupcakes is to use an ice-cream scoop to make sure each cupcake is the same size.

The cupcakes need to go in the oven at 180oc (fan 190oc) for 15-20 minutes or until brown.

Whilst the cupcakes are cooling, you can begin making the frosting; combine 200g cream cheese, 100g butter, 600g icing sugar and the remaining lemon juice. Then place it into a piping bag, wait until the cupcakes are cool and ice onto the cupcakes.

These cupcakes were made to celebrate Just Pootling's 1st birthday! So it was only right that they were decorated accordingly (with lots of glitter). The bunting and flags were made from Washi Tape and cocktail sticks.

Stripey Meringue Kisses

I first saw this recipe on Bakerella (my favourite baking blog ever) which was taken from the Meringue Girls cook book, the blog post featured a really helpful video on making meringues which is worth taking a look at. If you haven't heard of meringue kisses before they are little meringue bites with a crisp shell and a soft chewy centre.

To begin first spread out 300g of caster sugar on a baking tray lined with grease proof paper (or foil if you do not have grease proof paper - like me), the recipe suggests you put it in the oven for around 5 minutes at 200 degrees C (mine took longer than this) but it is ready once the sugar turns brown round the edges.

Whilst the sugar is in the oven, measure 150g egg whites (around 5 eggs) and place in a mixer, begin on a low speed to form bubbles and then increase until stiff peaks begin to form. You'll know when it is at the right consistency when you can tip it upside down without the egg whites falling out (best tried out on somebody's head!). 

Then once the sugar is ready (like the photo above on the left) begin to spoon it into the egg whites whisking at a high speed, once it has all been added, leave it to whisk on full speed for 5-7 minutes. There are two ways to tell when it is ready, one is when you can no longer feel the sugar when you rub the mixture between your fingers and the other is when it forms smooth shiny peaks on the tip of your finger.

Then for the fun part, take a piping bag and place it inside out over a bottle or something similar (I went for a Rose wine bottle of course) to create striped kisses, draw on stripes on the piping bag before turning it back out again and spooning in the mixture. Then snip off the end, make sure you don't snip it too high as the kisses will be too big.

Then begin piping them out onto a tray of grease proof paper by gently squeezing the piping bag once and then pulling it up. This sounds easier than it actually is (hence the odd shapes of some of mine) therefore it takes a while to get the hang of it but don't worry once baked no-one will complain regardless of the shape!

Then pop them in the oven at 100°C for 30-40 minutes (until they can be lifted off the tray in one piece).

You can either store these (for up to two weeks) and eat them as and when you feel like a sugary little lift...

Make a very fancy eton mess with them...

Or if you're feeling generous you can give them to someone has a gift!