Vanilla Cupcakes

A very simple recipe - that makes oh so cute cupcakes!!

4 med eggs
250g butter at room temperature
250g caster sugar
250g self raising flour
1 tsp baking powder
seeds from  half a vanilla pod, or 1tsp vanilla extract


Mix all the above together until smooth and creamy. Fill muffin cases 2/3rds full with mixture, smooth tops and bake at 180 for 12-14 mins until golden and a skewer inserted in middle comes out clean. Leave to cool.

For Icing, mix 500g of sifted icing sugar with 160g butter and 2 tbsp of milk and seeds from other half of vanilla pod or vanilla extract. Beat until smooth, then add colouring if required, and pipe or smooth onto cakes and decorate!

Jammie Dodgers and Custard Creams

Treats needed to go in Packed Lunches this week, so it's biscuits today,  2 of my favourite kinds too 

I used the same basic dough for each biscuit which is really easy to make and very pliable to easy to work with.

Ingredients for dough

170g butter
85g icing sugar (sifted)
170g pln flour (sifted)
55g custard powder (sifted)

Cream together the butter and icing sugar - I start doing this with a wooden spoon before using the mixer so that I  don't get covered in icing sugar when turning the mixer on. add flour and custard powder and using a K beater if using a food processor or a spoon and then your hands if you are not, work together until you have a nice ball of dough. The dough should feel lovely and soft and a bit like playdoh!

Roll out the dough and cut into whatever shapes you like. I Did stars for my Jammie dodgers, using the round end of a piping nozzle to cut out a small circle in half of the stars. I cut out the hole whilst the dough was still in the star shaped cutter so that it wouldn't cause the dough to spread out. For the custard creams I used a standard cutter, but for some of the tops I pushed a mesh shape into the dough before cutting out to give some of the tops a more interesting texture. Bake for about 10-12 mins then leave to cool on trays.

For the Jammie Dodgers I just sandwiched them together with the jam using slightly more in the middle so it would come up through the hole, and then sprinkled with caster sugar.

For the custard creams I made a custard flavoured buttercream icing.

Ingredients

80g butter at room temperature

250g sifted icing sugar 

2 tbsp whole milk

50g custard powder

beat the icing sugar and butter together after initially combining using a spoon. add the milk and the custard powder. Taste and add more sugar or custard powder if required. Then use to sandwich biscuits together. You can be quite generous with it.