Marzipan and Cherry Easter cupcakes

These are my contribution this year to Julia's Easter Cake Bake. I think that I should be rather proud of the standard of my entry this year, considering the poor job I did last year, but let's not dwell on that shall we.... I decided to make these cherry and almond Easter cupcakes to use some of the marzipan that I bought at Christmas to make a stollen for J. I should apologise to J here, because I never did get round to making that Stollen... some other time maybe. So it happened that I had a block of marzipan to use, and marzipan and Easter seem to be linked, what with Simnel cake (although that's more Mothering Sunday than Easter in my book) and so forth, so marzipan it was. I had recently made some rather poorly received (more to come on this, if I can bear to post about it) cupcakes so felt that it was time to redeem myself with work colleagues and make something that looked and tasted good (the last batch of cupcakes tasted fine, but didn't look very appealing and I'm coming to the conclusion that people eat primarily with their eyes....)

I found this recipe on the BBC Good Food website and decided to adapt it to my requirements. I didn't want 24 cupcakes, so I halved the recipe then tweaked it and got 12.

Ingredients
110g butter, softened
110g caster sugar
2 large eggs
125g self raising flour
100g marzipan, chilled and coarsely grated
100g glace cherries, halved if small, quartered if large (wash them first to get rid of the syrup - it'll help to prevent them from sinking in the cake mixure)

150g icing sugar
mini eggs to decorate

Method
- Preheat the oven to 180C/Gas 4. Line a muffin tin with 12 paper liners.
- Cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy.
- Add the eggs and flour and beat well until combined.
- Add the grated marzipan and cherries and mix well until combined. Divide between the muffin cases.
- Bake for 20-25 minutes until cooked and lightly golden brown (mine took 24 minutes). Leave to cool in the tin for a few minutes, then leave to cool completely on a wire rack.
- Make the icing by mixing the icing sugar with sufficient water to form a thickish icing. I know the Good Food recipe recommends 100g icing sugar for 24 cupcakes, but it wasn't even enough for my 12, let alone 24!!!
- Blob the icing onto the cupcakes and spread around a little. Top with mini eggs as desired.
I have to confess here, I bought two packets (2 x 100g) of mini eggs because as I suspected there weren't enough different colours in one packet alone to provide differently coloured eggs for all the cupcakes. My first packet had a preponderance of pink eggs. If you aren't as fussy, one packet will be plenty!

As to what they taste like, I don't know - I can't eat marzipan, but they were admired and then disappeared fairly rapidly with good comments being made, so I'm guessing they were moist and delicious!!! Probably with an almond flavour (well, you would hope so!) and juicy chunks of glace cherry. Your imagination is as good as mine!!!