Ginger Spice Cupcakes

I spend many happy hours baking and creating, but until today I’d never made ginger cake.  Yesterday I’d made some gingerbread men and used up the last of the dough by making a couple of dozen tiny ones. Suddenly I had inspiration – why not concoct a cupcake recipe and use the tiny *gingerbread men as toppers? This recipe, which makes about 20 cupcakes, is the result of that flash of inspiration!

For the cakes:

3 eggs, beaten

200g of self raising flour

2 teaspoons of baking powder

200g of dark brown muscovado sugar

200g of softened butter

1 rounded teaspoon of ground ginger

1 rounded teaspoon of ground cinnamon

2 tablespoons of milk

Method:

• preheat your oven to 180°C
• line two cupcake baking tins with cases
• place all of the ingredients into a large mixing bowl or food mixer and beat everything together until the mixture is smooth, creamy and well blended
• divide the mixture between about 20 cupcake cases

• bake the cakes for about 20 – 25 minutes, or until they are well risen and spring back to the touch

In the meantime, prepare the icing:

When calculating how much icing to make, I usually work on about 20g of icing sugar and 10g of softened butter per cupcake. This makes enough for a piped swirl on the top of each cupcake but doesn’t cover the surface entirely. However, if you like more icing on the cakes than this just increase the quantities accordingly.

For this quantity of cakes I used 400g of icing sugar beaten together with 200g of softened butter, then I added a dessertspoonful of tepid water to make the icing into a pipeable consistency.

Pipe a swirl of icing onto the top of each cake. I then topped mine with the tiny *gingerbread men I made yesterday, but instead you could use any of the following:

• a sifting of icing sugar with a pinch or two of ground cinnamon mixed in
• a chunk or two of crystallised ginger, very finely chopped  – just add a little to the top of each cake
• a chunk of ginger snap biscuit, or a whole one if you’re going for a dramatic effect!

Ginger cake and gingerbread seem to be suited to this time of year, somehow the spices and rich flavours are a good match for dark winter afternoons and cosy log fires!

* The recipe I used for my gingerbread men is from the BBC Good Food Magazine dated November 2015. It is probably also to be found on http://www.bbcgoodfood.com