Cupcakes Violet Beauregarde aka Blueberry cupcakes!

I tweeted that these were some of the most delicious cupcakes I've ever made, and I hand on heart was not lying.

I had originally bought blueberries to try my hand at some blue velvets as I keep seeing them and think they look really fun, and perfect for boys who like cupcakes. However, I kept thinking back to the amazing blueberry and lemon cupcake I had from Ottolenghi and decided to have a go a recreating it!

First I made a compote which is incredibly easy (this makes a lot you could probably half it - or use the leftovers with yogurt for breakfast?)

Blueberry compote
175g fresh blueberries
50g caster sugar (I used golden)

Cook over a gentle heat, stirring occasionally, until the blueberries begin to pop and then remove from heat and leave to cool.

Next the cupcakes. They are a plain vanilla cupcake, using my favourite 'go to' recipe - however I had no milk in the house so instead used organic natural yogurt and it worked a treat (I'll give the measurements for both below).

Anne's favourite vanilla cupcakes
125g golden caster sugar
125g unsalted butter (room temp)
125g self raising flour
1.5 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 large eggs
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
3 tablespoons milk (I substituted approx 2.5 tablespoons yogurt - until I got dropping consistency)

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees - I have a fan oven, and an oven thermometer (which I recommend everyone gets - the oven thermometer I mean).

Cream the butter, sugar and vanilla together with your mixer until light and fluffy. I do this for about 10mins to get a lot of air in.

Add the eggs, one by one and mix.

Mix in the flour and baking powder - I do this by hand as find the mixer knocks the air out of the flour and it makes a lighter cake. Than add the milk, or yogurt, and mix until all combined.

Scoop into cases using an ice cream scoop or a tablespoon. I get 10 large cupcakes out of this recipe - you can get 12 smaller ones though, it depends on your cases. In my oven these take just under 20 minutes. I find the house tends to smell of lovely baking and they're ready.  They are ready when you can stick a cake tester/cocktail stick in and it comes out clean.

Remove from oven and transfer immediately to a wire cooling rack.

Once cooled, use an apple corer to remove the centre of the cake and fill with a hearty amount of your cooled compote.

As you can see I didn't always hit the centre, but it's ok as you're going to cover them in lashings of delicious lemon frosting.

Best ever lemon frosting
100g cream cheese (full fat not light!)
40g unsalted butter, room temp
250g icing sugar (See note below)
lemon juice
lemon extract (I use Star Kay White)

Mix the butter and cream cheese for about 2 minutes in your mixer. Add icing sugar and then mix for about another 2 or 3 mins until smooth. Add lemon juice and some lemon essence to taste - I put in a few drops lemon juice and approx 1/2 a teaspoon to 1 teaspoon of lemon extract - tasting as I went. You want it to taste lemon'y and each persons taste buds are different.
Note: I added about two more tablespoons of icing sugar while adding the lemon extract as it thinned it out - you want it to be of piping consistency, ie not too runny!

Pipe onto the cupcakes and then plop a lovely blueberry on top and enjoy with a lovely cup of tea and decide whether they are the best cupcakes you have ever made. I think they're my favourites.

Finally, when making these I decided to test out some new Cath Kidston cupcake cases I got a while ago.

As you can see they were NOT worth the money. I'm a massive fan of Cath Kidston, I know it's a cliché to be a cupcake fan and love Cath but there you go, however these pretty much went translucent on baking. Not happy.

A tale of two cupcakes

Even after nearly 3 years of writing this blog I still get excited when I hear of a new cupcakery opening in London. Alas, these days I’m often left disappointed and more than a little sad. Not to mention out of pocket.

I read about Sweet Couture a couple of weeks ago, I think via Daily Candy, and had planned to go two weekends ago. We didn’t make it until yesterday, so the anticipation had been growing. The shop itself is small but perfectly formed. Their display reminded me of Lola’s and their flavours included all the favourites, double chocolate, vanilla, red velvet and peanut butter. As usual on our first visit somewhere we kept it simple – a vanilla for me and a double chocolate for Manny. Obviously I opted for pink frosting!

The cakes got a little, well a lot shook up on the way home (I blame the extra hot salsa on my burrito from the fantastic Benito’s Hat – that stuff is HOT!) but they didn’t get too squished – this to me wasn’t a good sign. If the frosting is so hard it doesn’t squish after being turned upside down several times by a man who shall remain nameless..Manny…hmmmm

So, the taste test. The cake part was a bit stale but not as bad as some I’ve had. Not a hint of vanilla in the cake at all though. Same with the frosting, no vanilla at all, unfortunately it tasted of nothing but butter. It was incredibly cloying and unpleasant – like eating a chunk of cold butter would be. All in all it was inedible so another cupcake ends up in my bin. Manny’s chocolate cupcake fared slightly better, ending up in his belly. I tasted a little bit and the cake itself was quite dry however and didn’t taste of much, and the frosting was ok but again had a very heavy buttery flavour. As Manny put it he didn’t have that lovely “just eaten some chocolaty goodness” feeling after eating it. I fully agree.

It’s such a shame, and we may have got it on a bad day – I may pop back and try another as the lady working there (the baker?) was really friendly and helpful and we’d hoped the cakes would be nice!

On the opposite end of the scale – a cupcake to die for. Well not literally but it was divine.

We popped to Ottolenghi’s in Islington on Saturday after some cupcake baking supply shopping at Gill Wing. Braving the HUGE queues we restricted ourselves to three items – a lemon and blueberry cupcake, a flourless chocolate bundt cake and a chocolate cake with baileys frosting. Everything looked so mouth watering it was difficult to restrict ourselves to three things – every time we thought we’d chosen we’d spot something else!

As it is near impossible to get a seat, we got our goodies to go and headed back home to scoff them with a hot cuppa tea with the heating on – Saturday afternoon bliss.

The cupcake was delicious. A moist blueberry filled base with Italian buttercream on top which melted in your mouth. Absolutely delicious.

Then it got better. The chocolate bundt, which Ottolenghi calls a tea cake, what can I say but – oh my. Well I could add, I wish I'd bought two! 

Then it got even better – Manny allowed me a morsel of his baileys cake and again oh my, the cake was incredibly chocolaty, the frosting melted in your mouth – and then the Baileys cream filling – oh.my.god I could’ve eaten a LOT of it. You could taste the Baileys but it wasn’t overpowering – absolutely fabulous.

All fresh, all flavoursome. If only the cupcake world could take that on as their motto.

Finally, I think Angel suspected this cupcake had a hidden secret. Although she may just have been trying to hypnotise it! "look into my eyes"