Instead, I shall concentrate today's efforts on the cocktail inspired cupcakes I made last night for my friend at work - Cosmopolitan cupcakes and amaretto cupcakes.
The cosmo cupcakes involve cranberries soaked in vodka & Cointreau, mixed into a fairly basic vanilla sponge which is drizzled with more cointreau once cooked. The icing is pink and fluffy, contains more vodka & Cointreau as well as lime zest and the whole thing is decorated with gold balls and edible glitter. I got the recipe from a magazine, which in turn had got the recipe from a book called Caketails (see what they did there?!). Now, me being me, I have to look at how to make these things better and this is no exception. Now a cosmo cocktail is vodka, triple sec or cointreau, lime and cranberry juice with a twist of orange at the end - this is where these cupcakes are lacking in my opinion. I love the alcohol soaked dried cranberries, but I think that the cake should also contain some orange zest and/or lime zest. The buttercream icing is fairly alcoholic to the point where the lime flavour gets lost. I think that this is a recipe that needs some development and probably some testing and frankly, I think the only place to start is with a cosmo cocktail! Mr Ellie, take note...
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| Cosmo cupcakes (top) and Amaretto cupcakes (bottom) |
So the other cupcakes I made were amaretto cupcakes - yes, technically not a cocktail but amaretto is soooo nice that you don't want to lose it in amongst anything else. These cakes were an almond cake with an amaretto buttercream. The recipe I used just had a plain vanilla buttercream but I figure that you can't have enough of an almondy taste so put the amaretto and a dash of almond extract in the buttercream. Mr Ellie tried an uniced cake last night and declared them to be "delicious" so I'll take that to mean that I'd best be making some more.
Happy baking!
Miss E xxx
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