Gloverly Cupcakes

Last week on the Great British Bake Off was patisserie week. I rarely make any patisserie stuff as it just takes so long to do (and that’s coming from someone who makes novelty cakes and loves spending hours making sugar paste flowers!). But having got this far with all the challenges, I couldn’t resist attempting another one! Click

It really was a very long recipe with loads of different stages, recipe can be found here. I also had to take a gamble and make it gluten free as I just couldn’t justify eating 9 Les Miserable cakes all to myself, so Rich would have to be able to eat them too.

It didn’t get off to a great start, I couldn’t buy pistachio paste so made my own, but it was too thick to fold into the sponge, so most of the air came out and I was worried it was going to be dense and horrible, but by some miracle the sponge seemed fine and no different to the lemon ones that had lots more air in them. Both sponges were the same height and tasted alright!

Next challenge was making the butter cream, it all seemed to be going well till I tried pouring the hot sugar syrup into the whisked egg yolks with the whisk running – most of it seemed to splatter around the side of the bowl and not actually get mixed into the egg yolks, so I had to keep trying to scrape the edges down before the syrup cooled and went solid around the edge of the bowl. But again, by some miracle it seemed fine and I managed to add all the butter and make a tasty butter cream.

Once all the elements were done the assembly was actually quite easy and I was very excited to attempt to cut it once it had been chilled. I didn’t manage to temper the chocolate properly but got the right shapes for the decorations. I used my tape measure to make sure each square was 5x5cm and slices them up to make 9 squares. I was very happy to see some lovely pretty layers and find that there were plenty of off cuts to try.

I really enjoyed making them and loved the sense of achievement in making something so pretty! They tasted really good too, light and not sickly sweet with subtle raspberry, lemon and pistachio flavours. But I can’t imagine it’s something I am going to be doing very often!