Cupcakes

It's a friend's birthday on Saturday. I wanted to make her something nice and I thought that some cupcakes would be in order. She doesn't like chocolate, so I tried Nigella's wedding cupcakes from Nigella Feasts.

I have seen her make these, complete with gloriously white royal icing, on her latest DVD and they seem so easy. Just throw everything into a food processor and then spoon into cupcake cases and bake. However, I managed to mess these up somehow. I halved the recipe and I think that I must have mismeasured something. The cupcakes sank and were dense and nasty. I think I also didn't cook them for long enough, even though they were in there five minutes longer than Nigella's specified cooking time.

It was a little disappointing and I wasn't really confident enough to try it again, so I fell back on something I had in the pantry.


I know, it's a packet mix, but goodness, what a packet mix! Whisk and Pin specialise in hand made gourmet organic muesli, but they also offer an array of gourmet baking mixes such as cakes, pancakes and scones. The Organic Vanilla Cupcake Mix includes organic self-raising flour, organic caster sugar, lemon powder and organic vanilla and smells so good!

These turned out perfectly. They didn't sink, they have a lovely light crumb and a wonderful lemony scent and flavour. I love lemons, so this little cupcake is heavenly.

I did make Nigella's royal icing to ice them. Since the icing also has a little bit of lemon juice added the match was wonderful. I hope my friend likes them.

The mix also includes little sugar flower decorations, which made me feel like a domestic goddess regardless of the fact I was using a packet mix.


My friend is a huge fan of The Nightmare Before Christmas, so I wanted to make these Jack Skellington cupcakes. I'm not normally very creative (which probably makes for a pretty boring blog!) but I had fun trying these. I used cocoa sprinkled over a template which I cut out with a stanley knife and with the assistance of some sharp nail scissors.


Do you think they look okay? I hope I can get them to work tomorrow without the cocoa moving. I'm going to take a photo so she knows what they started out like.