Gloverly Cupcakes

Last weeks challenge had to wait till we got back from Devon earlier this week, so I made this on Wednesday and assembled it on Thursday morning in a bit of a rush while trying to get Emily breakfast and get ready to go out. None of the individual parts were too complicated, but it was very time consuming to make! Click 

I started by making the meringue which was quite straight forward – although I realised that I only had one suitable Swiss roll tray, so had to make 2 separate meringues. Once they were baked and cooled I got the tape measure out to divide them in half and realised that my tray was much bigger than it should have been, so I had to do a bit of extra cutting of my meringue to get it to the right size otherwise I was worried there wouldn’t be enough buttercream to fill and cover it. The recipe can be found here.

The rest of the recipe was quite easy, just a lot of chopping and toasting nuts! The French butter cream was very time consuming –  making a praline, blitzing it in the food processor (which started to smoke half way through!), then making another hot sugar syrup to pour onto the egg yolks with the mixer running, then adding the butter a table spoon at a time and finally folding in the powdered praline. It tasted amazing though, so well worth it.

I was very nervous about cutting the meringue as it really felt like it was going to crack, but I found that by gently scoring the same line a few times, it eventually broke off nicely without too many problems. I also didn’t manage to find slivered pistachios, so had to make do with chopping some instead, they aren’t as bright green, but it still looked ok. If you have a whole day to spare to make a show stopping desert then this is well worth it and it looks very fancy and tastes amazing!