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Sunday, October 14, 2012

Raspberry Cupcakes with Raspberry Butter-cream Icing

As the name might suggest, these are mind-blowingly delicious.

If I do say so myself.

It's basically a simple vanilla yellow-cake recipe I tweaked to be freaking raspberry time.

And pink.

:)

So... mix up your vanilla cake recipe.

I suppose you could even use the store-bought batter-in-a-box kind if you had to... but honestly they're not much easier or time-saving.  Having used both, I can tell you that all the hard and time-consuming parts of cake mixes are there regardless.  You still have to add eggs, and beat with an electric mixer... so where's the time saved in mixing your dry ingredients yourself?

Anyway...  my recipe was from my trusty America's Test Kitchen's baking book.  I can always rely on them for taking any guesswork out of baking.  If you follow their steps, it will turn out their way.  Every time.

Well... I did, but let's not forget that I went and tweaked the crap out of this one.  Firstly, by purĂ©eing an entire pint of raspberries, and then mixing that in with the finished batter.



Pinkalicious!


These then got baked as normal.  About a quarter cup per cupcake liner.  I only made a half-recipe as I didn't need 2 dozen cupcakes.  So my entire batter fit nicely in one cupcake tray.


And turned out lovely!


But, that's only really half the job.

Now comes the 'raspberry butter cream icing'.

:)

About a 1/4 cup of unsalted butter, another full pint of pureed raspberries, and a spoonful of vanilla (I really wanted to use Chambord instead, but I didn't have any on hand).


Mix that up super well, and keep adding icing (confectioner's) sugar in batches, until you reach your desired thickness.  This makes a lot of icing.


In many recipes for this sort of thing, I've seen multiple suggestions for the use of red or pink food colouring.  Why?  I can't for the life of me think why you'd need food colouring when the raspberries' natural pigment is so unbelievably red to begin with.

Anyway... That's that.  Let it chill in the fridge for at least 30 mins (butter needs to harden), and there you have it..

Save a few raspberries (some of the better looking ones, obviously) for toppings.


And these babies are not only pretty, but deadly delicious.
:)