Ginger and Toffee, Lemon and Lime

So just an update on a couple of different cupcakes I've made recently.

Firstly I made Ginger and Toffee cupcakes which involved using a few spices within the sponge for the ginger part and then making some toffee/caramel to go into butter icing. I used a recipe from the UK TV food website, however I adapted a couple of the parts of the recipe as I read some reviews who had tried making them, who said they wanted to add more spices to the sponge to add more flavour.

Ingredients:

150g unsalted butter

150g soft brown sugar

3 eggs

150g self raising flour

1 1/2 tsp ground ginger

1 tsp ground cinnamon

pinch of grated nutmeg

1 tbsp full-fat milk

1 tsp baking soda (I would add this as they didn't rise very much!!)

For the butter icing:

200g butter

50g soft brown sugar

3 tbsp full fat milk

200g icing sugar

- Preheat the oven 160C (fan)/180C

- Cream together butter and sugar and light and fluffy

- Sift flour together with spices

- Gradually mix the eggs and creamed butter and sugar alternating with the flour to stop the mix from curdling

- Stir through the milk

- Divide the mixture into baking cases

- Put in oven for 20-25 minutes

For the frosting:

- Melt 50g of butter in a pan with the brown sugar and cook over a low heat

- Add 2tbsp milk until it forms a thick glossy toffee sauce

- Leave to cool

-In a large mixing bowl beat butter until smooth, then add icing sugar

- Add the toffee sauce and stir through until fully mixed.

Once cupcakes are out of the oven and cool, pipe the icing on to the cupcakes. Add some ground cinnamon on top as decoration.

(The icing went a bit wonky!)

If I was to improve anything on this recipe I would add baking soda to make them rise more as they hardly rose at all. For the brown sugar I used light brown sugar, next time I would use dark brown sugar to give it a richer taste. I would also make more toffee sauce to add to the icing, as the the taste wan't strong enough!

My boyfriend absolutely loved these cupcakes (even if they were slightly flawed!). He thought these were my best yet, so I would definitely recommend this recipe.

A few days later I made some Lemon and Lime cupcakes. I just thought this would be a nice flavour combination. I just used a Primrose Bakery lemon cupcake recipe for the sponge. I then just substituted lemon for lime in the lemon butter icing recipe.

These flavours did work however the lime slightly overpowered the lemon sponge. still yummy though!