Great Cupcake Recipe For our New Baking Cups

                                                                                                 


We have a fantastic range of bright and colourful baking cups now available to purchase here.
Because we had never used these type of baking cups before, we were giving samples to test.  They are very easy to use, are lovely and bright and best of all they are so cute!  You don't need to use a cupcake pan as these cups are free standing, however I like to use a cupcake pan anyway, just so they don't slide around on a flat pan when I put them into the oven.

One thing we did notice is that when baking in these cups, some cupcake recipes with a higher use of butter showed small amounts of 'greasy' patches once they came out of the oven.  Generally, using margarine worked better - however if you are anything like me and don't like margarine at all we have found a great solution!  Here is a recipe for vanilla cupcakes with no butter or margarine needed at all!

Butter-less Vanilla Cupcake Recipe

Ingredients

Makes 12-14 cupcakes

• 2 eggs
• about 250ml thickened cream
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract (if using vanilla essence add a little more to taste)
• 3/4 cup caster sugar
• 1 cup self raising flour, sifted

Method

1. Preheat oven to 160'C/320'F.
2. Crack the eggs into a 250ml measuring cup.
3. Fill the  jug to 250ml with cream.
4. Pour mixture into a mixing and beat with an electric mixer  for 1 minute.
5. Add vanilla and sugar and beat for 3 mintues.
6. Fold flour into mixture until combined.
7. Fill baking cups 1/2 to 3/4 full and bake at 160'C for 15-20 minutes or until golden brown.  Test with a skewer (skewer should come out clean when baked).

         


As you can see they look as bright and as pretty even after being in the oven!  I only filled mine up 1/2 way (making about 16 cupcakes). This is how much they rose (picture above) so next time I would fill them 3/4 so that the cupcakes came out just over the top.

And Now For The Icing!

         



And to now ice them!  I made a double batch of standard buttercream icing (1 cup icing sugar, 1 cup softened butter, 1 teaspoon of vanilla essence or in this case I used orange essence).  I then split the mix into 2 separate bowls and coloured them using Wilton's icing colours.  I then scooped each colour into the icing bag using a 1M icing tip.  To get the 2 colours in the bag, I held the bag  on an angle and put a small amount of pink into the bag.  I then put a small amount of purple next to the pink in the bag.  As you can see this is not an exact science you will get more pink on some cupcakes than others (though I quite like the effect)! To get the frilly look, starting from the outside of the cupcake pipe a spiral in towards the middle of the cupcake, moving up as you go.  If you pipe slowly squeezing as you go, you will get a cute frilly look - if you move faster it will look less frilly (but no less cute!).

Be careful when you ice your cupcakes as after a while the butter from the icing will start to soak into the top of the cupcakes and may  make the top of the cupcakes cup have a small 'greasy' looking patch here and there.  This is why I would make my cupcakes a little bigger next time so that the icing sits off the cup.  You could also pipe them as late as possible.  I piped mine at around 2pm and didn't notice the small patches until around 10pm (dessert time at the party!)....I have to let you know though that none of the guests noticed the patches at all - they were too busy eating them, fighting over the last ones and hiding them from each other!

Bon Apetit!

By the way, Shindigs.com.au have a fantastic range of cake decorating supplies to suit everyone from novice to pro level.  Be sure to also check out our Pinterest  page for tonnes of great cake decorating ideas!