Sunday, July 31, 2011

Amaretto Cupcakes

Last night was my colleague Iain and his lovely fiancée Dani's engagement party. I decided that I would make the Amaretto Cupcakes from my Primrose Bakery book that I have been after making for absolutely ages.


I went to my favourite baking shop in the Arndale Market to get a big cake box that fit 12 large cakes, as well as some edible gold glitter to try and make the cakes look a bit classier than my usual slapdash efforts.


As I was making the cakes for a present and I wanted them to be top notch, I decided from the start to be super organised about getting all my ingredients out ready at the start so I didn't have to scramble around for ingredients halfway through cooking. I almost managed it, but forgot the vanilla essence. No biggie - just the smallest, most difficult thing to find in the whole baking box. Grr. Oh well, it's a mistake I won't make twice.


The cakes actually turned out really nice. The use of the syrup makes the cakes really soft and moist and the Amaretto icing was very yummy and perfect for a wedding-related gift but very sweet indeed. These cakes are not for the faint hearted!


I tried to be super careful and gentle when icing the cakes to try and make sure they came out looking presentable. They were still a bit messy but much neater than usual!


Recipe

For the cakes:
110g unsalted butter
180g caster sugar
2 large eggs
125g self-raising flour
120g plain flour
125ml semi-skimmed milk
1 teaspoon Amaretto

For the Amaretto syrup:
125g caster sugar
125ml water
1 teaspoon Amaretto

For the icing
115g unsalted butter
60ml semi-skimmed milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
500g icing sugar
2 teaspoons Amaretto

Start by making the cakes. Preheat the oven to 160 degrees C and prepare your cake tins. In a large bowl, cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time mixing well.


Sift the two types of flour into a separate bowl.


Also, in a jug mix the milk and amaretto together.


To the original eggs, butter and sugar mix, add one third of the flour and beat. Then add one third of the milk mix and beat. Repeat this process until all the flour and milk is nicely beaten in and you have a smooth mix.


Add your mixture to the cake cases using two teaspoons and put into the oven. Cook the cakes for 25 minutes or until lightly browned and a skewer comes out clean from the middle of them.


While the cakes are cooking in the oven, you can get on with making the amaretto syrup and amaretto icing.


For the syrup, mix the water, amaretto and caster sugar together in a saucepan. Place the pan over the lowest heat until all the sugar has disappeared. You will now have a lovely runny clear syrup.


For the icing, mix together the butter, amaretto, milk, vanilla extract and half of the icing sugar in a bowl.


Beat the mixture until nice and smooth.


Gradually add the rest of the icing sugar until you have a nice thick icing. More amaretto can be added to taste or if the icing is looking too thick. Cover the icing until ready to ice the cakes.

When the cakes have been out of the oven and cooling in their tin for 10 minutes, it is time to add the syrup to the cakes.

With a teaspoon, drizzle the syrup over the cakes until they are fully covered in syrup. If you put too much on and there's a pool of syrup, you can always pour it onto another one of the cakes.


Once all cakes have been syrupped, take them out of the tin to finish cooling. When the cakes are cooled you can ice them using a palette knife. Once the cakes are iced, decorate with edible glitter. I used a (clean) make up brush to apply the glitter which seemed to work quite well - much neater than it would have been had I used my fingers!


So there we go, yet another great recipe from my beloved Primrose - lovely light amaretto cupcakes!


4 comments:

  1. Hello fellow food lover! I made these cakes the other day but they turned out very stodgy, almost as if they were slightly undercooked as well - definitely would not describe them as light! I've not made cupcakes before, but my dad also had a go with the recipe the following morning; however the results were the same :( Any ideas as to what we're doing wrong?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hello Ellie! Oh no, sorry to hear the cupcakes didn't turn out right! I'm not too sure what could be making your cupcakes stodgy, I will check my ingredients when I get home from my Christmas holidays. Other than that I wonder if your oven might be different to ours so you might need to leave them a bit longer. Also did you sift your flours as that sometimes affects things?

    ReplyDelete
  3. The flour was sifted yes, but I must say our oven isn't great (we are due to get a new one soon though!) I just remembered I had to open the door a couple of times as they weren't cooked properly after the stated time - this could have made them sink a bit? When my dad did them he put the heat up a notch and left them for the same length of time but still turned out rubbish :(

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hello again, Right, I have checked my original recipe and turns out I may have made a mistake - I wrote on here that the quantity of butter required is 100g and the recipe says 110g. As it was a while ago I can't quite remember if I did this on purpose or not! I will change it on here just in case... I guess a bad oven could make a difference but our oven is pretty rubbish too but the cakes turned out nice! I suppose all ovens are different, perhaps you could try leaving the cakes in longer at the same temp until they look golden brown. Other than that, I'm really not sure! :( sorry, hope they turn out better if you dare to try them again! Please do let me know, I hate having baking disasters! x

    ReplyDelete

Thanks for dropping by and leaving us a comment!

LinkWithin

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...