Saturday 26 March 2011

Chocolate cupcakes with chocolate lime buttercream


It's that time again - We Should Cocoa! This month's challenge was set by Chele over at Chocolate Teapot - she announced that the challenge this month was to be lime! Lime isn't a flavour that I'm very familiar with, I am more often to be found zesting lemons and oranges, so this was a good challenge for me.

It seems at the moment that I'm obsessed with buttercream frosting - what can I say? Well, I guess after years of thinking that I really don't like buttercream all that much - too sweet and sickly, I've come to appreciate a swirl on top of a cupcake can be a good, in fact, great thing indeed. I still don't want too much, which is why you can still see cake around the edges - too much is still too much, if you see what I mean...

So, in line with my current obsession I decided to make chocolate cupcakes with chocolate lime buttercream frosting. If you look really carefully you can see tiny little flecks of green in the buttercream - it is there, I promise!

The cupcake recipe is Nigella Lawson's cupcake base from her Night-and-Day Cupcakes, which she has apparently shared with Good Morning America - so I'll point you there for the method, and for cup measures if that's your thing. If not, the measurements are given below:

Night-and-Day Cupcakes
Ingredients
2 scant tbsp cocoa powder
2 tbsp boiling water
75g golden caster sugar
50g dark muscovado sugar
125g self-raising flour
2 large eggs
125g very soft butter
1tsp vanilla extract
1tbsp milk, plus more if necessary to achieve a dropping consistency.

For the buttercream
75g very soft butter
150g icing sugar
zest and juice of 1 (very large, or 2 smaller) lime(s)



These were very popular and disappeared rapidly at work. The lime was subtle perhaps I need to add it to the cake batter as well next time, but these were delicious as all chocolate cupcakes are!

5 comments:

cocoa and coconut said...

I must experiment with chocolate and citrus! I imagine it would be great. And yes, I love buttercream as well! So delicious and fun to pipe ;)

Jacqueline Meldrum said...

They look good and I do love limes. Can you tell me what nozzle you used? I am useless when it comes to icing and don't know which nozzles to buy.

Caroline said...

Brittany - I love piping buttercream!!!

Jac - I can tell you exactly which one I used - I bought the set from Lakeland and it's this one:
http://www.lakeland.co.uk/professional-piping-set/F/keyword/piping/product/2233
Hope that helps - I never know what people mean when they say a 1cm star tip or a 2cm plain tip - too confusing! I tried lots of them out making melting moment biscuits here too;http://cakecrumbsandcooking.blogspot.com/2008/06/butter-whirls.html to see how well they worked. The nozzle I used this time was the star one at the left of the top picture, and pictured last of the four I tested out.

The Caked Crusader said...

Love the look of the chocolate buttercream. Oh, I really want a chocolate cupcake now!

Anonymous said...

Chocolate and lime reminds me of Choc Limes sweets I used to have when I was little - retro! This looks like a yummy recipe - will have to knock up a batch to remind me of my childhood :-)

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