Cute Cupcakes

So I got a new recipe book last weekend and have been dying to give something out of it a go! It is the new Women's Weekly Classic Cupcakes book, and Wow! I do not even know where to begin, but I had to start somewhere and thought I would start with a simple vanilla butter cake, topped with my first attempt at butter cream icing. It was a lot easier then I had thought it would be and very, very yummy. Lucky it made more then I needed. The butter cream icing was not the only new thing to me today but so was piping the icing onto the delicious little cakes. I have never used a piping bag, I always saw myself as more of a spatula kinda gal.

So we shall begin with the Vanilla Butter Cakes
90g of Butter, Softened
1 tsp of Vanilla Extract
1/2 a Cup of Caster Sugar
2 Eggs
1 Cup of Self-raising Flour
2 tbs of Milk

Start my Preheating your oven to 180 Fan Forced, and line 8 holes of a muffin pan.

Next Beat the butter, vanilla extract, sugar, eggs, sifted flour and milk in a bowl with an electric mixer on low speed until all the ingredients are combined.

Increase speed to medium and beat until mixture has changed to a paler colour.

Next fill each patty pan with 1/4 of a cup of mixture and bake for 20 mins.

Stand in pan for 5 mins before turning out to cool.

Once the muffins have cooled you can get started on the Butter Cream Icing. For that you will need:

185g of Softened Butter

2 1/4 Cups of Icing Sugar, Sifted 

1/4 a Cup of Milk 

Pink Food Colouring

Beat the butter alone until as white as possible.

It looks a lot yellower in the photos

Beat in sifted icing sugar and milk in two batches. Once combined add in the pink food colouring until it reached the desired colour.

And this is where I left my comfort zone...

Place the icing into the icing bag and pipe a large swirl onto each cake. I also added a few cachous beads.

Overall I think this was a fairly good effort with the piping. I cant wait to try my hand at it again!