Sunday 12 December 2010

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.

10 comments:

Brownieville Girl said...

I'm a huge ginger fan too!!

Cupcakes look fantastic.

Kim said...

Oh yum, they look lovely! I love anything ginger, especially at this time of year!

Chele said...

Do you know I don't think I have ever made a ginger cupcake. I must take a pole too ... these little guys are so sweet looking
;0)

The Caked Crusader said...

Oh yum - perfect flavours for this time of year

Anonymous said...

Just the name of these cupcakes is enticing... and the picture just confirms that these sound absolutely perfect. A little nip of ginger wine on the side maybe?

Caroline said...

BG, Kim - thanks, ginger must be one of my perennial favourites!

Chele - thanks - you must try ginger cupcakes if you like ginger as a flavour!

CC - yum indeed!

Joanna - I do think that a nip of ginger wine on the side would be perfect in this chilly weather!

Nic's Notebook said...

Delicous looking! Just come across your blog and I love it lol... ;)

Anonymous said...

I adore butterfly cakes - they always look so beautiful! A Violet Crumble is a hard honeycomb bar (honeycomb candy, not the real stuff) coated in milk chocolate. There's more info here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violet_Crumble

Alicia Foodycat said...

Butterfly cakes are so pretty! We always used to have them at birthday parties when I was growing up, but never anything as sophisticated as ginger & buttermilk!

In Australia violet crumbles and crunchies are quite different - crunchies have a much more open texture and (IMO) artificial flavour, but I haven't tried crunchies here to know if they are the same.

Caroline said...

Nic - thank you, glad you're enjoying my blog!

Celia - thanks for that link, Violet crumbles look slightly different to Crunchies that I know, but interesting article!

Foodycat - thanks for the crumble/crunchie explanation. I'd recommend you try a UK crunchie, but I'm not particularly partial to them either! Butterfly cakes are an easy way to make cupcakes look pretty aren't they!

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