Week 2 - still going!

Jaffa Cake Cupcakes

This week’s baking project didn’t start out too well – I intended to make a Chess Pie, and armed myself with a shopping list.  According to the recipe book, it’s a pie that isn’t generally heard of outside the deep American south.  Which means, turns out, its ingredients cannot be found in the supermarkets of the deep Welsh south.  I couldn’t find cornmeal or white vinegar (only white malt vinegar – is it different?  I didn’t want to find out the hard way), so I abandoned that recipe, and went for the first recipe in the book, Jaffa Cake Cupcakes.

About 5 years ago I bought a recipe book of 500 Cupcakes, then later the Hummingbird Bakery book Cake Days, so when it comes to cupcake recipes, I’ve seen ‘em all.  But the idea of creating an almost deconstructed Jaffa Cake was appealing, especially at the last minute.  These cupcakes consist of making an ordinary vanilla cupcake sponge, cutting out a piece of sponge from the top of the cake, filling it with orange marmalade, putting the sponge lid back on, covering the sponge with chocolate buttercream icing, and topping with a mini Jaffa Cake. 

The Bake

This time I only strayed from the recipe slightly, by using skimmed milk (1%) instead of the whole milk in the recipe.  I’ve done the same when making the cupcakes in Cake Days, and I can’t see any difference in bake/taste, except that it does make the mixture quite runny, so it takes a few spoonfuls to fill the case two-thirds.  What I will say, however, is make sure the butter is soft enough!  For sponge mixtures I would normally use Stork/margarine as it’s much cheaper than butter, and is always soft, however the butter had been out of the fridge a good six hours.  Unfortunately, due to the cold weather, the kitchen temperature is about the same as the fridge temperature, so the butter wasn’t quite soft enough, and the mixture was a bit lumpy…

 

The 16 sponges turned out perfectly, and while they were cooking I made the icing.  I even sifted the icing sugar and cocoa powder (I’m not generally a sifter). Seems the pressure of putting the results on the internet is making me up my game.  I always halve the quantities when I make frosting from my other Hummingbird recipe book, as the ratio of 500g of icing sugar to 12-16 cakes seems excessive.  So I used half of the amount of the recipe, except for the milk, which I used as was needed, as the 30ml I initially put it wasn’t enough to bind the icing sugar and butter.

 

Once the cakes had cooled, I cut out a small bit of sponge from the middle of the cupcake, filled it with almost a teaspoon of orange marmalade, put the top part of the cut out sponge back on top, then covered it with the buttercream.  I just use a knife to smooth the icing – I have yet to master piping!  The last step, of putting a mini Jaffa Cake on top, really finishes it off and makes it look like a statement cupcake, rather than an ordinary chocolate cupcake.  And they taste great!  Especially when you taste the sponge, marmalade and chocolate icing together – it really tastes like a Jaffa Cake.  I’m not a fan of marmalade, but with the sponge and icing you forget it’s marmalade, and just think it’s the Jaffa layer of the classic ‘is it a cake or a biscuit’ treat!  I will definitely be making these again.

Come back next week for my next bake – happy baking!