The Legal bit

All rights reserved by the writer of this blog as recipes printed here are either devised and adapted by the writer or reproduced by kind permission of friends or family and cannot be reproduced without the expressed written permission of the writer. All Photographs are not to be reproduced anywhere without written permission from the owner.

Recipe links are provided for recipes that have been found elsewhere on the WWW and it would be appreciated for others people to do the same and give recognition to the author of recipes.

29/03/2010

Fairy/cup cakes


Fairy cakes are traditionally British, a small light cake with a simple icing made of icing sugar and water, left plain or flavoured and coloured if preferred, topped with a glace cherry or hundreds and thousands, in fact with anything you wish. Also used to make butterfly cakes by slicing of the top and cutting this in half to make the wings putting butter cream on the top before replacing the ‘wings’ and dusting the cake with icing sugar.
Variations can be by adding some dried fruit or chopped glacé cherries or flavouring with a few drops of essences or with cocoa powder to make a chocolate version.
In more recent times since the explosion in popularity of the ‘cup cake’ this recipe has been used to make larger cakes and decorated often very elaborately with butter cream and adornments.

Ingredients £0.53
4oz 110g butter
4oz 110g caster sugar
2 large eggs
Pinch salt
4oz 110g self raising flour

Method
1. Preheat an oven to 180 °C. Cream together the butter and caster sugar until smooth, light, creamy and quite pale in colour.

2. Beat the eggs with the pinch of salt and beat this into the butter and sugar mixture with three tablespoons of flour. Then fold in the remaining flour.

3. Divide equally into 12 cake papers in patty tins. Bake for approximately 10-15 minutes until firm and just spring back when lightly pressed. Allow to cool before decorating.

Variations
Chocolate: substitute 1 oz (25g) of flour for 1oz (25g) coca powder (NOT hot chocolate powder).
Cherries: add 1 oz of chopped glacé cherries to the mixture.
Dried fruit: add 2 tablespoons of sultanas, raisins, chopped apricots or chopped dates to the mixture.

To make cup cakes with the mixture I use an icecream scoop to make 6/7 cupcakes in muffin papers/tins with the same mixture and cook for aproximately 20-25 minutes.