Easter Cupcakes

These are my little Easter treats!! My sisters will think they are cute for Easter, and we have some friends coming over for a BBQ tomorrow, so they should enjoy them too!!

My inspiration for these were Cadbury's Creme Egg cupcakes - chocolate cupcakes that have a mini creme egg cooked in the middle of them, with vanilla icing and topped with another mini creme egg. No-one in my house will eat chocolate cupcakes though, so I made lemon cupcakes with lemon butter icing and they had a mini caramel egg on top. I definitely prefer Cadbury's caramel eggs to Galaxy's!

I like how you can see little bits of lemon zest in the 'egg white'!

So these are meant to be chocolate cupcakes, it is Easter after all! What goes with Easter better than chocolate and eggs? Chocolate eggs that is...

Recipe:

Cupcakes

- 110g melted butter

- 275g caster sugar

- 2 eggs

- 1/2 tbsp vanilla extract

- 100ml water

- 350g self-raising flour

- 85g cocoa powder

-1/2 tsp salt

- 125ml plain yogurt

Icing

- 150g butter

- 250g icing sugar

- 2 tsp vanilla extract

- Milk

1. Preheat the oven to 180 degrees. Line a muffin tray with 10 cupcake liners.

2. Mix the melted butter with the sugar until it is cool.

3. Beat the eggs into the mixture one at a time. Add the vanilla extract and water.

4. Sift in the flour, cocoa powder and salt. Mix together gently.

5. Stir in the yogurt.

6. Divide the batter between the 10 cupcake cases and bake for 15-20 minutes.

7. Whip the butter until it turns white, or almost white. 

8. Add the icing sugar and vanilla extract. Mix together. The icing may need some milk to get it to the desired consistency, about 4 tsp (20ml) should be good.

9. Remove about 4-5 tablespoons of the icing, put it into a separate bowl and dye this yellow. I use paste dye so that it doesn't make the icing runnier. If you are using liquid colouring, remove this icing from the big bowl before you add the milk!

10. Pipe a ring of white icing around the edge of the cupcakes.

11. Fill the holes in the middle with yellow icing. Place a mini creme egg or a mini caramel egg on the top!

Hmm...

They don't look too fantastic, I'm not good at piping the icing yet!! Maybe I should have stuck to crumbling a Flake over the top for a bird's nest and sticking Mini Eggs on...

Zoe x