AKA – Cutesey Valentines Cupcakes!

Of course we needed something cute and adorable to mark the day. These cupcakes have the bonus of being quick and easy to make too so you can whip some out for your sweet.

They started out life as just plain white chocolate cupcakes.. Obviously I needed something pink, strawberry seems to be traditional but I am a fan of raspberry. Raspberry buttercream was the plan but then I wanted some raspberry in the cake too, just to tie it together a little more. So a dollop of jam was put in the centre of the cake, adding some extra flavour and moistness.

Start by melting the white chocolate and butter together with a little water, over a double boiler. While that’s melting mix together the flour, sugar and salt.

Pour the chocolate into the flour and start to mix. Before it’s fully incorporated add in the sour cream and egg. It’s a rather loose, liquid batter so don’t be worried!

I half filled my cupcake liners, added a little bit of the jam and then finished filling them. They baked for about 20 minutes.

Once they were cool I made my buttercream and added a good amount of the jam to it for flavour. I would have preferred seedless jam but they didn’t hurt at all. I also added a drop of red food colouring just to give it a boost!

And they all got topped with heart sprinkles, because, why not!

I think in future I’ll let the cakes cook then cut out the core and put the jam in that way. Putting it in before baking led it to all sink to the bottom. They were super tasty though, they’ll definitely make an appearance in our kitchen again.

The stars are pearl dragees and royal icing, for some variety in size, then we added some large stars on wires.

The main challenge was how to decorate buttercream to look like marble, after a few practices we found a method that seems to work for now, giving light and dark variances in colour, and veins running through it.

We added the age in Roman numerals around the side and then researched the Latin equivalent for Happy Birthday (as I discovered, the Romans didn’t celebrate birthdays as we do, so there’s no direct translation, the inscription we found appears to approximately mean ‘congratulations on the moment of your birth/natality’

The cake was a vanilla butter cake with black raspberry filling.

Now, this is apparently an entirely English thing that I’m introducing America to, but it’s a good cake, even if it is a fruit cake.

But it’s a good fruit cake (I’ve seen the ones in the shops here, I wouldn’t eat one if you paid me!), and here’s the important bit, it’s soaked in alcohol!

The cake making is in fact a process that takes a few months, starting by soaking the fruit in alcohol, then making the cake. Once the cake is made it then gets soaked in alcohol. In this case we used Cherry Bourbon.

A week before Christmas it’s covered in marzipan (homemade, and less sickly sweet than the shop bought marzipan here), and once that’s dried out it’s covered in fondant. From there you can decorate it as you wish.

For this cake we made some white modelling chocolate and dyed it, cutting out several hundred leaves (no, I’m not kidding, it was 800 in total). Then we decorated the cake to look like a Christmas wreath.

Happy Holidays