Coco Loco Cupcakes

These delicious cupcakes are iced with a coconut and lime butter cream, made with a naturally flavoured coconut and lime icing sugar from Sugar and Crumbs and were inspired by the Coco Loco cocktail. When sugar and crumbs were looking for bloggers to test their sugars and cocoa powders, who could resist volunteering? Not me! I volunteered and the lovely people at sugar and crumbs sent me three samples to try and this is the first. 

When I heard that I was going to get the coconut and lime naturally flavoured icing sugar to try (thank you so, so much!) and was thinking about what to make, the though of coconut and pina colada's entered my head, this may or may not have something to do with the fact that the pina colada was my bedtime drink of choice on a recent trip to Cocoa Beach in Florida, (so wrong and yet so right). 

I love a Pina Colada, but, you know how when it is cocktail time and you really want to have a pina colada, because they are the most unctuously scrummy cocktail, but, somehow a pina colada doesn't seem sophisticated enough, so, you end up ordering a margarita or a mojito instead, which is still yummy, but not in the dizzy heights way of a pina colada? This got me thinking how good would a coconut and lime cocktail be? Would the lime lend the coconut a little sophistication? And that is when I discovered the coco loco cocktail. A blend of rum, coconut and lime. I'm leaving the rum out today and letting that icing sugar do most of the work for me.

Recipes for these cakes and butter cream, follow below then next time, I will share how I made the decorations. 

So, what do these taste like? Amazing. The flavour is definitely coconut and definitely lime, well flavoured and not too strong. This was always going to be a sure fire winner for me, because I love coconut so much. My son and husband who claim not too like coconut enjoyed these too and my other taste testers all declared them smooth, creamy and super yummyily coconutty.

You can tell from the texture of the butter cream (no grainy-ness) that this icing sugar is a good, quality product and it pipes nicely too. One of the benefits of using a flavoured icing sugar, is that you can rely on it to give a good consistent flavour, so there is no worrying about how much of the different flavourings to add.

Is it good value for money? At the time of writing, a 250g bag is £2.99 and 500g bag is £4.99, which is not a lot of money compared to many things and about three times the price of an unflavoured bag of icing sugar. In their recipes Sugar and Crumbs do mention that, because the icing sugar has a strong flavour, you can use half their flavoured sugar and half ordinary icing sugar, you will, of course, get a more delicate flavour. We all have different circumstances, I am a Mum to a young son, working 35 hours a week at my day job, so convenience comes pretty high on my list of priorities, baking and blogging is squeezed into my "free time", so for me, not having to zest a couple of limes, or squeeze ;o) a coconut, or even start a batch again because the flavours are not right, not balanced correctly, or too strong, is worth paying a pound or two more for. If you have ever over salted a salted caramel butter cream, you'll know where I am coming from.

I was lucky to get these samples from Sugar and Crumbs for free, having browsed the flavours, I think I could well become one of their regular customers - Banana Split or Cherry Bakewell anyone? I have two more samples to try, come back soon to find out what they are, or follow me at any or all of the places at the bottom of this post.

If you do pop over to sugar and crumbs, don't forget to say Hi and let them know I sent you.

Coconut Cupcakes Recipe

Ingredients

120g  plain (all purpose) flour

140g caster sugar

1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

40g softened butter or margarine

120ml coconut milk

1 egg

Preheat your oven to 170 C / 325 F. (I set my fan oven to 155 C) and lay out your cupcake cases ready. These lovely ivory baking cases are from Culpitt. This recipe will usually make nine to twelve cupcakes.

I am using a crumb method to make these coconut cupcakes, this freaked me out a bit the first time I used it, so I have I have shown the steps below, so you will know what to expect at each stage.

Method

Step One

Put the 120g plain flour, 140g caster sugar, 1 1/2 teaspoons of baking powder and 40g of butter or margarine into the bowl of a stand mixer.

Step Two

Using the "K" beater, mix on a slow speed until the mixture becomes crumby.

Step Three

Put the 120ml of coconut milk and the egg into a jug or cup and mix together to break the egg up. With the mixer running on a slow speed, slowly pour the coconut milk and egg down the side of the bowl, until the mixture just changes from looking dry to looking wet.

Step Four

The "just wet" mix will probably look a bit lumpy, turn your mixer to a higher speed for a 20 or 30 seconds or so, to smooth out the cake batter and get rid of those lumps. Don't mix for too long though, or you will over work the flour and your cupcakes won't be nice and light and fluffy.

Step Five

With the mixer running on slow speed again, pour the rest of the coconut and egg mixture down the side of the bowl. You should now have a lovely smooth glossy cake batter.

Step Six

Divide the batter between your cupcake cases. I like to use an ice cream scoop to get them all the same size. This scoop is a size 16, which means if you have a litre of ice cream, you would get 16 scoops out of your litre. Next time I make these, I might put more mixture in each baking case, the size 16 was perfect for the flat fondant topped cupcakes, a little more would have been good for the butter cream swirl cupcakes.

Step Seven

Put them in the oven and bake for 20 to 25 minutes. When cooked they will be a lovely soft brown colour and spring back when touched lightly on top.

Butter Cream Icing

Now to the star of the show, this lovely icing sugar from Sugar and Crumbs. As soon as you carefully open the bag, you know you have something special here, this icing sugar is so fine that billowy clouds escape as soon as you have a tiny peek and then you are surrounded with the amazing scent of coconut with a little citrusy spike of lime.

Recipe

You don't need a recipe, as such, for a traditional English Butter cream, it is made from equal quantities, measured by weight, of butter and icing (powdered / confectioners) sugar. 250g or 8 ounces of both will give you enough butter cream to pipe swirls on about 12 cupcakes. I live in Gloucestershire, England and the butter here is a gorgeous country yellow. For these cupcakes, I wanted a paler icing, to match the baking cases and also to complement the citrus shades of the decorations I was using, so, I used a mix of half butter and  half vegetable fat (Trex / Crisco).

Method

You need to make sure the butter is really soft before you start. You can soften butter by leaving it at room temperature for a couple of ideas, or microwave it on low power. Once softened, put the butter in the bowl of a stand mixer, with the "K" beater attached and give it a good beat round for a couple of minutes before you start. This is just to make sure it is soft and get it all nice and smooth. You need to sift the icing sugar, to make butter cream, if you don't, any lumps, not only spoil the texture of the butter cream, but, may also get stuck in your piping nozzle / tip later.

I know, you don't need to see pictures of how to sift icing sugar, but, I wanted you to see how fine this icing sugar is.

 Just a couple of taps and most of this icing sugar has fallen through the sieve already.

I don't know about you, but, the brand of icing sugar I normally buy has quite a few lumps and I have to work most of it through a sieve with a spoon. Not only is this inconvenient and time consuming, but, it can also be responsible for that grainy texture, you sometimes get with butter cream. Not so with this one from sugar and crumbs, after a few more shakes and taps, there were only these few small lumps in my pack. Practically nothing.

Sift in about half of the icing sugar, then cover your mixer with something, a tea towel usually works well and start mixing, on slow speed until the sugar is incorporated and the clouds of icing sugar have settled down. Then speed up and beat on high speed for a couple of minutes. Repeat with the other half of the icing sugar. Lift your beater and have a look.

If your icing looks like that above, it is not ready yet, put the beater back in and beat on high speed again, till it looks like the picture below. All ready for decorating.

Call back soon if you would like to see how these cupcakes were decorated and find out what I do with the other samples from Sugar and Crumbs.

 That's all for today

Thanks for popping by and please call again soon

Keep up with my latest creations and inspirations in all these places

www.facebook.com/thesugarmice

thesugarmice.tumblr.com

www.flickr.com/photos/thesugarmice/

http://weheartit.com/Thesugarmice

My Cake Central Page

My Cakes Decor Page

Vanilla Spice Latte Cupcakes Part Two - The Desirability of Buttercream?

I feel that our friend, the dear cupcake is fighting a defining battle. On the one hand we have the delicious looking scrumptious cupcakes topped with decadent towering swirls of buttercream and dripping with caramel or chocolate sauce and on the other the sophisticated smooth beauty of the fondant domes, understated and refined, beautiful and oh so wedding ready. These cupcakes above and all those below are the Vanilla Spice Latte Cupcakes that I shared with you last time. They are a coffee and cardamom flavoured cupcake topped with swirls of vanilla buttercream.

I'm a big fan of both buttercream swirls and fondant topped cupcakes and combined the two in this cupcake tower for John and Fiona's wedding, but, you know what? and it is really hard for me to say this, but, there is something about those fondant topped cupcakes, that, well, just doesn't make me want to eat them, at least not in that, I have to have that delicious swirl of buttercream, right now and keep eating them until I feel sick kind of way.

I know that I am not alone in this, I have taken batches of cupcakes to work and found quite often any fondant topped ones are left forlornly alone at the end of the day, their buttercream topped cousins having been devoured hungrily many hours previously. Maybe people see fondant and think of that cheap chemical tasting stuff that covers those cheap supermarket Birthday cakes? Or maybe they say, "Oh, those are too pretty to eat", but nothing truly delicious and scrumptiously tempting was ever too pretty to eat? Was it?

My husband thinks that this is just people's greed - they take the buttercream swirls because they look the biggest and I think there is some truth in this, but there must be something more behind this preference too. I don't know whether you saw it, but there was an episode of Horizon that aired in the UK at the end of January this year that featured some research by Paul Kenny of the Scripps Institute that discovered that foods that had about 50 / 50 ratio of fat to sugar, may stimulate the pleasure centre of the brain so much that we can't resist or stop eating them. Scroll down to the bottom of this post to read more about this.

And do you know what? buttercream just happens to be pretty much a 50 / 50 fat to sugar ratio. Well, whatever the reason, I decided to try prettying up my buttercream swirl cupcakes with some sugar flowers to see if they could compete in the looks department with those fondant tops and these iare what I came up with.

The large flowers are the same as I used on the Chocolate and Caramel Giant  Cupcake I made last year that was raffled for charity, except that I changed the flower centre to a coffee bean, I thought this was a minor stroke of genius and hope that you agree. I tried the flowers n two different colours, ivory to represent the cafe latte flavour and green to be reminiscent of the cardamom.

So what do you think? Do you want to eat one of these, or would you prefer the plain old buttercream swirl? 

 That's all for today

Thanks for popping by and please call again soon

Keep up with my latest creations and inspirations in all these places

www.facebook.com/thesugarmice

thesugarmice.tumblr.com

www.flickr.com/photos/thesugarmice/

http://weheartit.com/Thesugarmice

My Cake Central Page

My Cakes Decor Page

This is how the Express summed up the research referred to above

"Feeding laboratory rats with either high-fat and high-sugar diets did little to change their daily habits or health but supply them with chocolate, biscuits and cheesecake (a near 50-50 fat and sugar split) and behaviour changed radically.

They ignored other foods for the cheesecake, going back to it regularly rather than gorging, and put on weight. Their self-regulation system, that naturally stopped them eating too much fat or sugar, effectively switched off.

“It became their main source of calories,” Kenny tells Horizon. “They gained massive amounts of weight, became sedentary, slept a lot and did not move around.

He found that the allure of processed food was overriding the body’s natural hormones that regulate intake by alerting the brain that the body has enough calories. It is the same faculty that is impaired in drug addicts whose On-Off mechanisms are degraded by the release of pleasure hormones in the brain’s hedonic system, he says"

Read the whole article from the Express here if you are interested 

Vanilla Spice Latte Cupcakes

Every new year, I'm sure, as many of you do, I make a mini resolution not to drink so many coffee house coffees. Not that my habit is that huge, maybe one or two skinny lattes a week. The past few years, this mini resolution has been scuppered by a certain, well known, international coffee house bringing out their vanilla spice lattes. This latte is flavoured with cardamom which is by far my favourite spice (well, today's favourite at least) and I find them completely irresistible. Each year , I intend to make a cupcake version of this velvety drink and this year, I actually managed it and today, I am going to share my recipe with you.

These Vanilla Spice Latte cupcakes are coffee and cardamom flavour cupcakes topped with a generous swirl of vanilla buttercream.

Cardamom is the mystery spice that makes the vanilla spice latte one of the lushest things you have ever tasted, it is often used in curries and if when eating a curry you have found your mouth suddenly filled with fragrant bliss, then the humble looking cardamom pod is most probably the cause.

These cupcakes are made using a crumb cake method, if you haven't made a cake or cupcakes like this before, it might require a bit of a leap of faith for you to have a go, believe me it will be worth it, this method of making the cupcakes, makes it less likely that you will overwork the gluten in the flour resulting in a lovely light soft textured cupcake. It also uses a lot less fat than the more conventional creaming method and this could really work in your favour if you have been suffering with the dreaded peeling cupcake wrappers.

Recipe

Ingredients

Double shot of espresso or strong instant coffee powder

10 cardamom pods to give about 1 teaspoon ground or crushed cardamom

120g plain / all purpose flour
140g caster / superfine sugar
40g margarine or butter
1 and a half teaspoons of baking powder
1 egg
About 100ml double cream or milk

Pre heat the over to 170 F / 325 C

Method

Start by making or buying a double espresso coffee. If you can't get this then mix at least three teaspoons of strong instant coffee powder with enough boiling water to dissolve it.

Next put the 10 or so cardamom pods into a pestle and mortar, crush lightly to separate the husks from the seeds and then remove the green husks. The husks are edible, so it is OK if some bits get left behind.

Now grind up the black seeds, to release that lovely aroma.

To make the cupcakes, start by putting the 120g flour, 140g sugar and 1 and a half teaspoons of baking powder with the 40g margarine or butter into your mixer with the K beater and mix on a low to medium speed until the mixture become sandy.

Now put one egg into your well used, scratched up and indispensable measuring jug, preferably pyrex. If you don't have an old beaten up one, a new and shiny one will do the job, but, of course your cupcakes won't taste quite so good ;o).

You will probably find that your egg measures about 50ml and this is perfect if it does. If it is more or less, it doesn't really matter either. Add your coffee infused with the cardamom seeds into the measuring jug and then top up with enough double cream to bring the total amount of egg, coffee, cardamom and cream to 170ml. I use double cream to give the cupcakes that milky latte flavour, but, if you haven't got it, or don't want to use it, substitute whatever milk or cream you have to hand. Give your liquids a good mix together with a fork and take a good sniff and you'll be immediately transported to your favourite coffee house.

Set your mixer going on slow speed and start to pour your liquid onto the edge of the crumby mixer to to incorporate. As soon as the mixture turns from dry crumbs to something that looks wet, stop pouring and turn up the mixer for a minute or so, until you have a smooth batter. Turn your mixer to slow again and add the rest of the liquid.

You should end up with a lovely smooth and glossy divine smelling batter. Fill your cupcake cases half to two thirds full and then bake at 170 F 325 C for 20 to 25 minutes.

This batch made nine medium sized cupcakes for me.

Buttercream

Buttercream is traditionally half butter and half icing sugar. I find this a little soft so use 250g butter and 350g icing sugar. It is a good idea to start with equal amounts of icing sugar (confectioners sugar) and butter (never margarine) and experiment a bit, till you find what works for you. I added a teaspoon of vanilla bean paste to add the vanilla flavour.

These swirls are piped with the legendary Wilton 1M nozzle (tip). I went around four or five times to give these lots of height and be reminiscent of that swirl of whipped cream on top of your latte.

Obviously, lovely as a buttercream swirl is, I couldn't leave them like this, could I? More soon .....

 That's all for today

Thanks for popping by and please call again soon

Keep up with my latest creations and inspirations in all these places

www.facebook.com/thesugarmice

thesugarmice.tumblr.com

www.flickr.com/photos/thesugarmice/

http://weheartit.com/Thesugarmice

My Cake Central Page

My Cakes Decor Page

Jewelled Flower Cupcakes

I see lots of beautiful sets of cupcakes, usually made by English ladies, made of complimentary flowers and colours, each slightly different to the other, usually referred to as "vintage", I love these and want to make a set one day. BUT ... Firstly, I struggle to find time to make 20 or 30 of each of the different flowers and pearls and leaves and other beautiful things that are required and secondly, there is always one design that I like more than the others and that is the only one that I want to make, which I suppose is why mostly, my sets of cupcakes or cookies are all the same.

So, here I am, with only a couple of evenings to spare, needing to make some cupcakes to be sold for charity at a craft fair and wanting to make something more than a buttercream swirl with some sprinkles. Everybody loves sprinkles and I love sprinkles, I just wanted to make something a little more me. One of my aims is to learn to make more sugar flowers and I haven't done as many as I would have liked, so seized this opportunity to make some for the cupcakes.

I suppose this flower is a fantasy flower. It is reminiscent, to me, of a peony, although it is made with a hollyhock cutter. The one I used is from a Sunflower Sugarart set. I love the crinkly outline of the petals.

The Cupcakes were made with this recipe from the Hummingbird Bakery Recipe book and my own chocolate butter cream recipe. The chocolate butter cream swirls are piped with a Wilton 1M nozzle.

Making the flowers

You will need

1. Flower cutter and silicone veiner. I used one from Sunflower Sugarart

2. Sugar florist paste in whatever colour you want to use for the petals.

3. Sugar florist paste in whatever colour you want to use for the centres.

4. A ball tool

5. A Dresden tool

6. Round flower formers. I used ones from Wilton, or you can scrunch tin foil into shape

7. A mould for the centre of the flower. The one I used is the Karen Davies Vintage Brooch Mould

8. Lustre dusts and edible glitter. See below for the details of the ones I used.

9. A little vegetable fat (trex/crisco), cornflour / cornstarch and a little edible glue.

Start by rolling out the sugar florist paste as thin as you can and cut out a flower shape. Use the ball tool to stretch the petals and thin the edges a little.

Press the cut out and thinned flower between the two parts of the silicone mould and press together to add the veining. You will notice that the two parts of the mould have  little notch so that you can line them up properly.

I wanted my veining to be a little more prominent, so I used a Dresden tool to make some of the markings deeper. This flower doesn't really look that special yet, it is amazing how it is transformed with a little lustre, a centre and a shape.

I popped the veined flowers into some curved flower formers to take shape whilst I made some centres for the flowers. I  knew that I wanted a stylised centre for my flower, first of all I tried this moulded button, below. It is cute, but, not quite what I was looking for.

Next, I tried the little jewelled centre, below. This was just the look I wanted, so I set about transforming it with a little petal dust, lustre dust and edible glitter.

The mould that I used for the centres, is this Vintage Brooch Mould by Karen Davies.

Moulds are so easy to use, take a small ball of sugar florist paste and work it till soft, roll it into a little ball and press it into the mould that you want to use. Smooth around the edges and remove any excess, then pop out the moulded paste

To paint the centres, I used:-

1. Sugarflair pearl ivory lustre dust all over
2. Edible Art edible glitter in baby blue in the centre
3. Sugarflair  autumn leaf petal dust to add colour around the outside
4. Squires Kitchen gold sparkles on top of the autumn leaf colour

After sticking the jewelled centre in the centre of the flower with a little water, I brushed a little more of the gold sparkles lustre dust on the centre of the petals

Then, back in the flower former to finish drying

That's all for today

Thanks for popping by and please call again soon

Keep up with my latest creations and inspirations in all these places

www.facebook.com/thesugarmice

thesugarmice.tumblr.com

www.flickr.com/photos/thesugarmice/

http://weheartit.com/Thesugarmice

My Cake Central Page

My Cakes Decor Page