Monday, September 13, 2010

Cupcake Experiment One

Lady Grey Tea Cupcakes with Orange Blossom Frosting


This is the first of many cupcake/baking experiments I shall be conducting over the next few months, having found I've become stuck in a vanilla-cupcake-cream-cheese-frosting rut recently I feel the need to expand my repertoire! Not to mention all the recipe books I seem to be collecting that have been merely glanced at!

I've made a pretty decent, and on-going, list of the flavours I want to try together and this has been floating about in my brain since my addiction to Lady Grey tea kicked in earlier this year at work and I had to limit myself to two cups a day.

Thankfully this also gave me the opportunity to try two more recipes from the Primrose Hill Bakery recipe book which I've enjoyed using in the past.

These cupcakes have a really British summer-time feel about them and I liked the idea of combining the orange blossom frosting and the subtle citrus flavours from the Lady Grey tea. To do this I adapted the Primrose Hill "Earl Grey Tea Cupcakes" recipe by infusing Lady Grey tea instead. The process of making the cupcakes was really easy, and they looked perfect when they came out of the oven.

The frosting was also adapted from a Primrose Hill recipe, and adapted simply because I used clementine juice instead of orange, having forgotten to grab them during my supermarket run! I also added a little yellow and red food colouring at the end to create a lovely warm orange colour. The frosting was really easy to pipe and icing swirls stayed in place!

My cupcake Guinea Pigs aka my family all really enjoyed these cupcakes though found the frosting a little too sweet and the cake more crumbly than moist. Which I agreed with. This isn't necessarily a flavour combination I would try again as the citrus flavours became overpowering and sickly. I couldn't finish my cake!

So here are my ratings. 1 = very difficult/bad and 5=very easy/good

Recipe Difficulty - 4/5
Look - 4/5
Taste -3/5

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