Gloverly Cupcakes

It’s been a gorgeous week, full of spring sunshine so I couldn’t resist making some spring cupcakes as a present for Matt and Beckie who looked after Emily on Saturday while Rich and I were at a wedding. Click

I made some chocolate orange cupcakes – I think these are now my favourite flavour! The recipe can be found here. I made the chocolate orange butter cream from the Hummingbird Bakery book, which is the best ever – not only is it chocolate butter cream but its also a cream cheese one too, yum! Here’s the recipe:

600g Icing Sugar

100g Butter, softened

250g full fat cream cheese

60g cocoa powder

3 tsp orange zest

• Whisk the icing sugar with the butter on a low speed either using an electric whisk or free standing mixer with the paddle attachment. Whisk until crumbly in texture and no large lumps of butter remain.
• Add the cream cheese, orange zest and cocoa powder and continue to mix on a medium speed until the frosting is light and smooth. You’ll need to scrape down the sides a few times to ensure it’s all mixed.

For the decorations, the caterpillar and the dragon fly were made with small balls of sugarpaste stuck together with a small dab of water. The eyes were made by rolling out a small amount of white sugarpaste and cutting circles out with a Wilton No. 3 nozzle and then I used an edible pen to draw black dots in the middle.

The wings were made using a heart shaped cutter. The bumble bee was made with a small piece of yellow sugar paste and I rolled out some black sugar paste very thinly to make the stripes, but you could always draw/paint them on with some food colouring.

Luckily I baked a few extra, so managed to enjoy one this afternoon with a cup of tea after a nice walk in the spring sunshine!