Cupcakes

Several people asked me for the cupcake recipe I used at baby's naming ceremony, so here it is below.

I doubled the recipe to make 24 cupcakes and baked them in two batches because I only had one muffin tray.

Cupcakes
125 g butter
3/4 cup caster sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 eggs (at room temperature)
1 ½ cups self
raising flour
1/2 cup milk

Preheat your oven to 180 C.
Beat the butter and sugar until pale and creamy.
Add the vanilla and eggs (one at a time and beating well after each addition).
Stir in the flour and milk and mix until smooth.
Line a muffin tray with cupcake papers and divide the
mixture between the 12 papers.
Bake for 15 minutes or until a skewer comes out clean.
Allow to cool and then ice with butter icing.

Butter Icing
250g softened butter
3 cups icing sugar
1/4 cup milk (or water) to mix

Place butter in a bowl and sift in icing sugar.
Cream with a fork.
Add milk a bit at a time to get a spreadable consistency.

I then split the icing into three lots and added flavouring and/or food colouring (just a drop or two) to each:

Strawberry icing: spoonful of strawberry jam (couldn't find any essence in Mum's cupboard)
Lemon icing: lemon essence and yellow food colouring
Vanilla icing: vanilla essence and a drop each of yellow and red colouring

Decoration
You can buy icing flowers and other motifs from specialist bakeries. Don't waste your time with mail order - no matter how conscientious the supplier is, there'll be breakages.

Next time I make them I'll try nice fat piped icing like this: Mrs Kwok's Chocolate Classic Cupcake with Pink Frosting.

Related posts
Naming Day Ceremony
Naming Day Wording (Naming Day Script)
Cupcake Recipe
Memory Box