Ginger and spice buttermilk cupcakes

I did a little survey at work recently and ginger came out as a particularly popular flavour for cupcakes. Well, who am I to ignore my colleagues preferences? Ginger it would be. I had some buttermilk left over from a different recipe and a vague recollection of many interesting cupcakes in one of my many baking books that called for a small amount of buttermilk - far less than it's worth buying commercial buttermilk for. This seemed like an idea opportunity to make one of these recipes and luckily, the ginger one called for buttermilk. Serendipidy!

The closest I can find online is this recipe. It's identical to the recipe I followed, except to make my version you'll need to omit the 50g chocolate. Or you could leave it in and follow the recipe as given. I was tempted to (this is another of the recipes in my book) but decided that I didn't want chocolate. If you do want to follow that recipe and are UK based, I believe the nearest thing to violet crumble bars in the UK are Cadbury's Crunchie (or similar, but not branded eg supermarket own, although a quick browse on the web shows that you can definitely get supermarket own mars bars, snickers, bounty and milky way but not crunchie, hmmm....) but perhaps one of my Australian readers could confirm that?

They were pretty flat when they came out of the oven, which provided a good surface to start decorating on. I would have preferred a bit more lift for the decorations I had in mind though, so next time I'll use all self raising flour. I had planned a swarm (apparently this is the correct collective noun for butterflies! - loads of other really random ones on this website) of butterflies but they all flew away (?!) and I could only photograph this one lonely one. Still it gives you an idea of how they turned out. The filling is a ginger buttercream. Well, a buttercream made with ginger syrup added from a jar of stem ginger. I have to admit that I couldn't taste the ginger flavour in the syrup at all, even though I knew it was there! and next time will add some chopped stem ginger to it for a real ginger boost.

In spite of coming out slightly flatter than I would have liked, these cakes were really light and delicious but still very moist - I think this must be the buttermilk in the cake. Using the different spices was really good - the flavour was more rounded than just using ginger. The quantities given in the recipe give a fairly mild spicy flavour rather than anything very hot or obvious. I might increase the quantities next time.