Cupcake Love.

While I love baking all kinds of warm, sweet goodies, my favourite thing to make, and signature 'dish' would have to be cupcakes. Smaller, less messy and more easily transported than a full-sized cake, cupcakes are a sweet, versatile treat with limitless flavour and presentation possibilities. Perfect for a kiddy birthday party or a grown up afternoon tea, we pretty much always have some cupcakes on hand to take to work for a morning snack or to accompany an afternoon cup of tea.

This book by Martha Swift and Lisa Thomas from Primrose Bakery in London is my cupcake bible.

And it's these two basic recipes that I use most often. They are delicious as they are, and very easy to adapt to create different flavours, textures and combinations

Here's what the vanilla cupcake mixture looks like all ready to spoon into the cupcake trays. Yum!

For this batch which I made on Thursday afternoon, I turned the basic vanilla cupcakes into four different flavours - Nutella Swirl, Peanut Butter and Honey, Blueberry Cheesecake and Raspberry and White Chocolate - by adding a couple of extra ingredients straight into each individual cupcake just before they went into the oven.

For the Nutella Swirl cakes, I added about half a teaspoon of Nutella straight from the jar and used a toothpick to swirl it through the top of the cake batter.

To make the Peanut Butter and Honey cakes, I used two teaspoons to roll about half a teaspoon of peanut butter into a ball and dropped in on top of the cake, then used a toothpick to roll some of the batter over the top of the ball.

To make Blueberry Cheesecake cupcakes, I pressed two frozen blueberries and a little chunk of nice strong Danish cream cheese down into the batter so they were half-submerged in the cake mix.

And finally, for the Raspberry and White Chocolate cakes, I pressed two or three frozen raspberries and three white chocolate chips into the batter.

All of these went into the oven for 20 minutes, and viola!

Gorgeous, golden brown cupcakes, four ways.

Next step: icing.

I made a batch of vanilla butter cream as the recipe instructs, then divided it evenly into four different bowls.

For the Blueberry Cheesecake cupcakes, I stirred a tablespoon of cream cheese through one bowl of the divided-up butter cream, and popped a single frozen blueberry on each cake. 

To finish the Raspberry and White Chocolate cakes, I stirred about a tablespoon of melted white chooclate through the butter cream, and topped each one with a frozen raspberry.

The Nutella Swirl cupcakes need only one thing to make them even more amazing than they are on their own - more Nutella! So I added a couple of teaspoons of Nutella to the butter cream and stirred it through. If I'd had some hazelnuts I'd have put either a whole nut or some crushed nuts on top of the butter cream for some extra crunch.

And to add the honey element to the Peanut Butter and Honey cakes, I stirred a nice big tablespoon full of some locally produced organic honey through the butter cream and then dribbled a little extra on top. This flavour is my husband's favourite. 

There are plenty of other amazing recipes in this book that I keep coming back to, and I'll let yopu know about them another time. 

Do you have a favourite cake recipe that I should try out?

Anna.