Some juicy cupcakes

Last week I decided to go for an old favourite recipe of chocolate orange cupcakes from a generic cupcake recipe book. The book says this mixture makes 16 cupcakes...they must be really stingy because I just about scrape 10! I wish I had doubled up but I didn't, and 10 cupcakes were never going to make my chums at work happy on a Friday afternoon, so I also made plain orange cupcakes.

I had never made orange cupcakes before, and I just took a recipe for orange cake but split it into cupcakes. OH.MY. I am a complete chocolate obsessive but I loved these plain orange cupcakes. They rose to perfection (for a change!) and were soft, light and fluffy.


Recipe for chocolate orange cake:

115g butter

115g golden caster sugar

inely grated rind and juice from 1/2 orange

2 eggs

115 self-raising flour

25g plain chocolate, grated

• Preheat oven to 180⁰.
• Put butter, sugar and orange rind in a bowl and beat together until light and fluffy.
• Gradually beat in eggs.
• Sift in the flour and, using a metal spoon, fold gently into the mixture with orange juice and grated chocolate.
• Bake cupcakes for around 20 minutes, until risen and golden brown.

Very sweet and simple!

The recipe for the orange cake came from Australian Women's Weekly Cupcakes & Baking book. I basically used the mixing method above, but with the following ingredients (technically a cake recipe, but made about 16 deliciously huge cakes!):

150g butter

1 tbsp finely grated orange rind

(I added a splash of fresh orange juice too)

150g caster sugar

3 eggs

225g self-raising flour

60ml milk

I couldn't tell you the recipe for my frosting, because usual I chucked everything in haphazardly until it looked right. Anyway, to decorate the chocolate orange, I piped a simple chocolate buttercream and put a Malteaser in the middle. For the orange cupcakes, I used the rest of the fresh squeezed orange juice to make an orange buttercream, and decorated with fondant roses, using this fantastically easy tutorial from Almond Art. I then piped leaves using a Wilton #67 tip...as you can see from the pictures, I have yet to perfect the technique of piping leaves, and cake photography! Still, I was pretty chuffed with these cakes, and they were delicious.