Hummingbird Bakery Cupcakes

I make cupcakes fairly often, but nearly always following the recipes from the Magnolia Bakery in New York.  Their recipes for both vanilla and chocolate cupcakes produce a beautifully dense sponge which is very popular in this house, but they are quite time consuming to make, and even more so when, like me, you don't have an electric mixer.  Cupcakes were requested last week, but finding myself very short of time owing to job-hunting and interviews, and with only one egg in the fridge, I had to have a rethink.  I remembered a recipe for vanilla cupcakes from the Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook I'd copied down from the internet a while back.  The Hummingbird Bakery claims to be the destination in London for American-style cupcakes, so I was intrigued to find out how they would compare with the Magnolia Bakery recipe. 

The recipe is quite unusual, in that very little butter is used but it includes quite a lot of milk, making for a very liquid batter.  It was very quick to put together and the only problem I had was that the recipe claims to make 12 - I managed 10 but could have filled the cases higher in which case I think it would have been more like 8.   After baking for 20 minutes they were cooked through, the only notable difference from another recipe being that the rise was very flat.  Upon tasting, the sponge is incredibly light, much more so than the Magnolia Bakery recipe, and quite crumbly.  When topped with buttercream and dolly mixtures, it was felt that although a good texture, the sponge was almost too light, and so overwhelmed by the buttercream.  Perhaps they would be better topped with glace icing, but this would rather defeat the object of an  'American cupcake'!  An interesting recipe, and certainly one to consider, but for now at least, the Magnolia Bakery cupcakes remain firm favourites. 

Hummingbird Bakery Cupcakes

120g plain flour

140g caster sugar

1/2 tsp baking powder

pinch of salt

40g unsalted butter

120ml whole milk

1 egg

1/4 tsp vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 170c.  Mix the flour, sugar, butter, baking powder and salt together in a bowl.  Gradually pour in half the milk and beat until just incorporated.  In another bowl, whisk together the egg, vanilla extract and remaining milk, then pour this mixture into the flour mix and continue beating until just incorporated.  Do not overmix, but beat until just smooth.  Spoon into paper cases and bake for 20-25 mins until golden brown. 

When cool, top with buttercream and decorate however you wish. 

Baking for Macmillan (2)

I promised some recipes for the cakes I baked for the Macmillan Coffee Morning, and although it's taken a while I have finally got around to writing some up!  For the Victoria Sponge, I followed Nigella Lawson's recipe from 'How to be a Domestic Goddess', divided between two 8 inch sandwich tins.  I opted to fill it with a vanilla buttercream and homemade strawberry jam, and simply dusted the top with icing sugar.  The cherry cake was this recipe from bbcgoodfood.com.  It was the first time I'd tried it, and not being cherry season in the UK I had to use tinned cherries rather than fresh.  Nevertheless, it was very well received and the piece I managed to try was very tasty, but I think a better flavour would be achieved using fresh fruit, so will definitely try that next time.  It's worth noting though that as many people have commented on the recipe, the cake did take quite a bit longer to cook than suggested - I think I left mine in the oven for around 40 minutes, but testing it with a skewer was a bit hit and miss!  Ginger cake was made to a recipe from Rachel Allen, a gorgeously sticky loaf thanks to the syrup, and the fact that I use chopped stem ginger in syrup rather than crystallised ginger in the cake mixture.  It doesn't really need icing as well, but it's a nice finishing touch when making the cake for an event. 

Another first was a spiced apple cake, borne initially out of the need to use up some of the cooking apples from our garden.  There's only so much room in the freezer to fill up with copious pies and crumbles, so a cake seemed a good solution.  The recipe came from a little book of recipes from Olive magazine, '101 Seasonal Treats'.  It's a really good little book; I've cooked a few recipes from it now and all have been a success.

Squidgy Spiced Apple Cake

125g butter
225g dark muscovado sugar
2 eggs, lightly beaten
225g plain flour
2 tsp baking powder
2 tsp freshly grated nutmeg
1 tsp ground cinnamon
300g cooking apples, peeled, cored and diced
2 tbsp honey
2 tbsp demerara sugar

Heat the oven to 160c/gas mark 3, grease and line a 20cm springform cake tin.  Cream together the butter and muscovado sugar (make sure before you do this that your sugar hasn't set to rock hard chunks as mine had - ten minutes of beating later I still had lumps of sugar so I just gave up and hoped for the best!), then mix in the eggs.  Sift over the flour, baking powder and spices, folding in gently.  Add the chunks of diced apple.  Pour the mixture into the tin, bake for 60 minutes or until risen and browned.  While it's cooking, combine the honey and demerara sugar.  When the cake comes out of the oven, spread the honey and sugar mix over the top and sides while still warm. 

The cake was a bit rustic looking and didn't cut into particularly neat slices, but I think that just added to the charm.  It certainly smelled good, and I'm reliably informed that it was the first to disappear at school, with several requests for the recipe.