Spiced apple cupcakes for the teacher…

• Posted on 19th July 2012
• in Cakes and bakes
• by catherine

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So, today is my big girl’s last ever day at pre-school and I wanted to give them a little something to say thank you as she has been so happy there.

As you may know, I am a bit of a cake making fiend. I absolutely LOVE Hello Cupcake as they make really fun cakes with little more than a bag of sweets. So this apple cupcake idea was from their book (which I spend hours drooling over…) My only niggle I have with their gorgeous recipes is that it’s an American book and lots of the sweets they use are only available inthe US. Many a time I have had to give myself a stern talking-to after I’ve found myself on the brink of paying £24 for an imported box of Twinkies. However, I made do with UK equivalents and I don’t think they ended up looking too bad:

The Hello Cupcake apples looked really pretty but I wanted them to taste appley too, so I found this recipe from a lovely blog called ‘The Bake Escape’. I left out the walnuts (’cause who ever gave a walnut to the teacher, right?) and just made spiced apple cupcakes. Reading Michelle’s recipe (which she credits as a Hummingbird one) I was a bit concerned that the recipe called for 1 tbsp of baking powder. I thought it must surely be a typo and should read 1 TSP, but actually my cakes didn’t rise so well so although I would still probably not go for a whole tablespon of baking powder, next time I would probably play safe and use self-raising flour. The batter ended up looking pretty wet, so I was a bit unsure about how they would turn out, but actually (rising problems aside) they looked and tasted good. The best bit was the whole house was an appley cinnamon scented haze for hours…mmm.

Now I am a big Caramel Apple Granny fan, so I decided to give the cupcakes an oozy caramel centre. I cheated and used a tin of ready-made caramel. I made a hole in each cupcake with an apple corer, pulled out the little plug of cake, spooned in a little caramel and popped the top of the cake plug back in:  Voila! Extra added yumminess. To make the apple shape I did as instructed by the Hello Cupcake directions, which was to cut a mini doughnut in half and secure with icing to the top of my cake. All I can say is mini doughnuts must be a darn sight minier in the UK as they didn’t even reach the edges of the cakes. Next time I think I might try full size doughnuts and bake muffin size cupcakes.

 

I then covered the whole lot with red icing and added a fudge ‘stalk’ and a leaf made from green fondant. I experimented with a whole lot of different appley finishes (clockwise from top left: ‘nude’, red coloured sugar, nude with a sprinkle of edible glitter and dunked in glitter.) but decided on a sprinkle of edible red glitter as my preferred look. I ended up with 11 decent ones and found a basket which would only fit 9 in (and so had to eat 2, shame…)

Although I had yet another ‘what AM I doing?’ moment with them at about 8 pm last night when I had been making them for hours in snatched moments between the general mayhem that is parenting two small children, I was pretty pleased with the way they turned out and hope the teachers are too!

Tags: Cakes