Wednesday 1 June 2016

Orange flavoured cupcakes with lemon curd frosting

cupcakes, baking

My boys and I stayed at home all day on Monday, only venturing in the garden. To cheer them up, we decided to bake cupcakes. I recently received a few jars of preserves from Hawkshead Relish's new Couture range, including a delicious lemon curd.
I love lemon curd, but none of my men are too keen on it. I knew that the best way to use it would be to add it as an ingredient to baking. In this recipe I used this delicately flavoured preserve to make a lemon curd cream cheese frosting. And I was right, the cupcakes disappeared faster than you can say "orange cupcakes with lemon curd cream cheese frosting".

cupcakes, cake mix

Orange flavoured cupcakes with lemon curd frosting
Ingredients:
1 pack of Betty Crocker vanilla cupcake mix
2 medium eggs
45ml olive oil
50ml freshly squeezed orange juice
zest of 1 orange

for frosting:
115g icing sugar
60g softened butter
65g cream cheese
2tbsp lemon curd
chocolate sprinkles

Beat two eggs with the oil, orange zest and juice, add a pack of vanilla cupcake mix, mix well together. Divide the mix into 9 cupcake cases, inserted into a cupcake baking tray. Bake for about 15 minutes or less, just check with a wooden toothpick if they're ready.
Take the tray out of the oven, and let the cupcakes cool before decorating with the frosting and sprinkles.

Make frosting by beating together the icing sugar, butter, cream cheese and lemon curd. Pipe onto the cupcakes and add some chocolate sprinkles (they were included in the kit).

These are light citrussy cupcakes, delicate and flavourful.


cupcakes

We used a cake mix from Betty Crocker as a base, but any basic vanilla cake mix will do, including supermarket own. In fact, sometimes supermarket own beats the brand cake mixes, for example, a carrot cake mix from M&S is much better than many other carrot cake mixes we have tried, but I digress.

Cake mixes are frowned upon by purist foodies, but if you are baking with kids, it's a great kitchen staple.
Cake mix could always be improved by added extras like lemon or orange zest, milk instead of water, added spices, grated apple etc etc, the possibilities are endless.


5 comments:

  1. These sound so light and fresh, and they make a nice change from chocolate cupcakes too.

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  2. I bet that frosting is fab a great way to fill a dull day. GG

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  3. These look so yummy and sound very refreshing!

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  4. Unfortunately Betty Crocker (and a lot of cake mixes) contain palm oil...

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  5. These look lovely, loving the frosting

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