Category Archives: Cupcakes

Cupcake recipes

Basil & Browned Butter cupcakes with Browned Butter frosting

Now stay with me, please. This is not some bizarritey like Ham in Coca Cola (although have you tried it? It’s delicious). It’s a perfectly sweet cupcake, nothing pesto-like here at all, that just happens to have the pervasive taste and aroma of the most delectable nutty Browned Butter.

I’d cooked with Browned Butter ages ago but it had been over a year since I made something with it. It wasn’t until the Daring Bakers Caramel Cake that I fell in love with it again. And I fell fast. After the Daring Bakers cake, I made Ricotta Gnocchi in Browned Butter a couple of times and then wanted to make something sweet to go with it.

It wasn’t until a friend was coming around that I thought I’d take out the lovely Jasper Conran Chonoiserie setting that I have. I was devastated when I had bought a full 8 person setting of another pattern for our wedding only to find this range out. But if you’re a regular reader, you’ll know that I say that about so many China settings (other fetishes aside from food: Chanel nail polishes, lighting fixtures, cake stands and hats). In good news though, my shoe fetish has almost completely abated and it has been a good 6 months since I bought a pair. And I hardly ever get the urge to buy fur lined Zanotti heels any more…

Fur mules-impractical.

A much more practical shoe

I digress, back to the cupcakes. I tried to make these with a basil syrup at first but my impatience cost me. In an effort to speed up the cooling process for the basil syrup, I transferred it to another bowl where it magically crystallised. I was frightened-I had never had sugar crystallise on me before. One second it looked good and the next it was petrified as if a Dementor has swooped in and sucked the life out of it. So this time I ground some basil with some sugar to make a forest green basil sugar.

Basil sugar

The cake itself is gorgeous with a very crunchy exterior top much like a macaron, the soft but firm inside is deliciously nutty courtesy of the browned butter. And as for the icing, I used a restrained touch and didn’t use basil in the icing although if you’re a fan you certainly could.

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33 comments | January 8, 2009 by Not Quite Nigella

Jam Donut Cupcakes

I had rather specific taste when I was young. None of this high falutin’ stuff that I like now. Like most children the idea of eating most food, especially seafood, was grotesque. I recall when my older cousin got married, they served us large tempura battered prawns at the pre-wedding dinner and I proceeded to eat the batter off the prawns and left the huge prawn behind much to the clucking and disgust of the adults who thought that it was frightfully wasteful.

When I was young, my favourite donut ever was the Strawberry Jam donut, and the frozen Herbert Adams ones were my  favourites (do they still even make them?). Like a lot of parents, mine didn’t really listen when I told them what I wanted and every time I’d get a cinnamon and sugar donut which I’d never eat leaving me pining for a soft strawberry centered donut instead of the boring one with the hole in the middle. I’d also devour Bubble O’Bill ice creams and Twisters like the world would end the next day (and to a kid what did we know? It could have).

My friend Kathy in the US sent me the link to this from the Taste.com.au website as she had just made them and I was instantly smitten. So was my husband – when he first moved to Sydney before I met him, he’d eat a dozen donuts for dinner working the night shift at a website development company. Either that or a whole tub of yogurt. So it wasn’t hard to persuade him to take a trip down memory lane with me – for me it was back to when I was 6 years old and for him, 20 years old. I even brought some over to visit my food blogger friend Christie from Fig & Cherry one afternoon. These are deliciously addictive and beautifully soft, the cinnamon sugar instantly transporting back to a time when getting the donut flavour that you wanted was the most important thing in your life.

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61 comments | January 2, 2009 by Not Quite Nigella

Winnie the Pooh Hunny Cheesecake Cupcakes

I can only imagine my Mother shuddering and reaching for her red pen to correct my typo in the title. So Mummy Dearest, you’ll have to forgive me for sticking true to the story and making some Winne the Pooh Hunny Cheesecake Cupcakes.

I could have made a regular honey flavoured cupcake but I felt like something a little more rich and creamy. I decided to do a variation on the pumpkin cheesecake that I made the week previously so that the colour was true to Pooh but the sweetening was done through honey instead of sugar. The choice for a cheesecake cupcake was also due to a loathing of stale or expired food (it’s a response I think to my parents having sauces in their fridge from 1984). I had 3/4 of a packet of biscuits left from the Pumpkin cheesecake as well as some Pumpkin and neither myself or husband eat biscuits much so it seemed fitting to use these up as soon as possible before staleness set in.

Winnie the Pooh was extremely hard to do, his body was fine, but his face with the upturned nose required several attempts. Indeed I had a range of different Winnie heads, some resembling pigs or dogs before I finally settled on the real Winnie. And I know, Winnie is not that orange but I was a little too eager with the red colouring and ran out of fondant. I also know that Winnie wears a red shirt but I couldn’t muster up the energy to do a red shirt on top of his body given the struggle I had with his head I talked myself into figuring the Winnie must have had some naked moments every now and then.

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19 comments | November 11, 2008 by Not Quite Nigella

NQN’s ghastly, ghoulish Halloween party!

**Party photos added at the bottom of the story**

Those that know me know that I adore the macabre and ghoulish. I’ll sign up for anything vaguely creepy and Halloween, although barely registering a blip here in Australia, is a holiday I gladly celebrate. I think that for the months of October-December I’d like to be American because of the 3 holidays: Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas. OK we celebrate Christmas but we miss out of the other two.

In October I received my Dexter Season 2 DVD and in the set came a tshirt and an evidence pack complete with Crime Scene tape, you know the stuff that they use on US TV to cordon off a crime scene. No matter that the police tape here is reportedly blue and white. I was evilly fondling my precious length of Crime Scene tape, wondering who to play a trick on when I realised that Halloween was coming up and it was a most fitting decoration. I set to work on my invitations, based on the Friday the 13th Cupcakes I made earlier this year and emailed them out to my nearest and dearest.

Eyeball and Tarantula Spider cupcakes (recipe for Eyeball cupcakes here, Tarantula cupcake recipe see below)

For the three weeks leading up to Halloween, I scoured websites looking for Halloween themed decorations. The food was easy, I had a list of things I had been dying to make. Apart from the Crime Scene tape which would greet everyone at the front door, I knew to make it a truly fantastic Halloween party I had to do more than that. I purchased bags of decorations from dripping blood patterned tablecloths, skulls, spider webs to drape everywhere, hinged hanging skeletons, mini cauldrons (in which I will serve the slime soup) and ghoul and bleeding hand wall clings. I even had skeletons popping up from behind doorways and monsters grabbing people. I also made pictures with eyes that follow you when you walk past, something surprisingly easy to do with instructions here.

Coffin, ghost and bat cookies

So with 3 of the senses: taste, look and feel sorted, all I needed now was the spooky music to listen to which I purchased a great selection on a CD. I stopped short at making it smell like Halloween (I did consider buying lots of smelly cheese to recreate the smell but decided against it in case people missed the point and thought that our place smelled like that anyway).

There’s a reason I love Nigella and that’s because she has things such as Blood Clots and Pus and Slime Soup in her cookbooks. Before you turn up your nose, of course it’s not really Blood Clots, Pus and Slime but it certainly looks as though it is which is all that counts really. Also  Donna Hay had some fantastic ideas for Halloween and I loved the Goblin faced pies, Ghost Meringues and Pumpkin Cheese dip which I accompanied with broomstick breadsticks.

Slime soup in cauldrons

A cocktail had to feature something gruesome of course and the one that my husband first thought up was the Bloody Mary (most appropriate). I served it in a test tube a la The Lock Up (the perfect place for Halloween). I would’ve loved to have served these standing up in an antique test tube rack but I missed out on one on ebay by minutes as I’d asked my husband to remind me (note to self: don’t rely on husbands!). We didn’t have a lot of plain Vodka but we did have some rather fantastic Finlandia Grapefruit Vodka, a gift from my friend Em, so we used that and called it a Sour Bloody Mary.

Goblin pies (recipe here)

What was vital to me was being able to do things ahead of time as Halloween falls on a Friday so I needed to be able to do plenty ahead of time and the evenings before and assembling everything before the witching hour of 8pm.

My costume was a Corpse Bride (a very popular one this year-apparently one of Barack Obama’s daughters is going as Corpse bride too!) and I bought a wedding dress on ebay intending to cut it up to resemble the Corpse Bride’s dress not realising that what I actually won was a brand new gorgeous and sumptuous wedding dress that I could not bear to cut into so I left it be, making myself scary with the makeup instead (I bet Chanel never realised that their Jeans de Chanel palette would come in so handy on Halloween).

I knew I had to do special cupcakes and I received a cupcake display stand from Queen Viv so of course I draped the cupcakes in spider’s web. Without further ado, welcome to NQN’s Ghastly and Gruesome Halloween party!

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49 comments | October 31, 2008 by Not Quite Nigella

Eyeball Cupcakes

You’ll have to forgive me this continuing theme this week. To those new to the site, I usually alternate a cooking story with a restaurant review but this week I’m taken by Hallowe’en. Utterly besotted by it in fact. Hallowe’en along with Christmas are my favourite holidays of the year. So I hope you’ll forgive the onslaught of Hallowe’en themed food. I promise you that as soon as the clock strikes midnight on Hallowe’en we’ll return back to “normal” (whatever that may have been for me).

The idea is from Claire Crespo’s Hey There Cupcake! book, the book for all mad and wonderful cupcake decorating ideas. To avoid having a complete breakdown, I made these ahead of time so I needed a dense and moist cake that would last a few days. I used a white chocolate mud cake and at my husband’s suggestion, some red food colouring to simulate the red veins in an eyeball or blood spatter (I blame my Dexter addiction).

The first lot I made wasn’t quite risen enough as I filled it 2/3 of the way full. I found that filling it 3/4 of the way up with only a few millimetres to spare at the top actually worked better. The recipe is from the Crabapple bakery’s White chocolate mud recipe although the recipe below makes 14 suitably domed cupcakes. The domed cupcakes are what you really need for the eyeball to take full effect. And let me wish you a very spooky Halloween coming up this Friday!

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23 comments | October 28, 2008 by Not Quite Nigella