Bonfire Night is nearly upon us! We had our village bonfire last light (and it was a good one, especially the plastic marquee nearly catching fire from the sparks!) with some spectacular fireworks too! I love Bonfire Night, its a weirdly primal thing, standing around a huge fire in a field with your village eating hot dogs and jacket potatoes… well, may be not so primal there!
From about the beginning of October I get obsessed with Gingerbread. I just love it! It’s such a unique taste and texture, my body just craves it around this time of year. Little did I know there was a way to improve it!
Gingerbread cupcakes!!! The gingerbread recipe transfers so well to cupcake form, it doesn’t get too dry or heavy, stays nice and lights and chewy! Add to that speculoos buttercream and you have one of the tastiest things I’ve eaten all year!
Makes 12
2 cups self raising flour
1 cup light soft brown sugar
1 tsp ground ginger
1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 cup milk
1 tbsp butter/lard/Trex
2 tbsp golden syrup (One BIG dollop on a spoon works)
200g unsalted butter, softened
400g icing sugar
2 tbsp milk
5 tbsp speculoos paste (Could go with 1 tsp cinnamon if you can’t get hold of the paste but that stuff is delicious and well worth the effort!)
red food colouring paste
red edible glitter
chocolate sprinkles and shards (Matchmakers are perfect here but I didn’t have any!)
– Heat the oven to gas mark 3 / 200C and prepare a muffin tin with paper liners (I like the brown ones best here.)
– Measure out the flour, sugar, ginger and bicarb into a large mixing bowl.
– Measure out the milk, butter and golden syrup into a small saucepan.
– Bring the milk just to the boil, melting all of the butter and syrup.
– Pour the wet ingredients into the dry and give a good mix around until you have a smooth, spongy batter.
– Divide equally between the cupcake cases. You want to be filling them just over about halfway up.
– Bake for 20 minutes.
– Put the butter, icing sugar, milk and speculoos paste in a medium mixing bowl and beat well until a smooth buttercream is formed.
Now there are several ways to do this next bit:
– Paint a stripe of red food colouring paste up the inside of a piping bag in several lines. Fill the bag as normal and pipe your icing onto your cupcakes.
– Add a bit of red colouring to your bowl and marble it so you have swirls of red.
– Use one of those two colour piping bags from Lakeland… this is what I did and I will never do it again, it was a nightmare!
I suggest the first method as probably the most reliable.
– Ice your cupcakes using a large star tip and then sprinkle the top with red edible glitter. Get them nice and high, there’s plenty of buttercream here so don’t be afraid!
– Add small chocolate sprinkles and larger shards of broken chocolate as logs.
– Feast!
Anna in the kitchen 
Very creative! They look fantastic