Orange Cardamom Olive Oil Cupcakes with Orange Blossom Water Buttercream

After spending the last two weeks developing and cooking savoury dishes, yesterday I heard the call of flour, butter, sugar, eggs and... olive oil?!?

I was going to make these because a) they look amazing and b) my friend Carlo keeps asking me to make them, but, seeing as I had no whipping cream in the house (a highly unusual occurrence) I had to work with what I had.

I used this recipe from the Food Network for the cake and I added one teaspoon of freshly crushed cardamom seeds. I filled mini Martha Stewart cupcake liners 3/4 full with cake batter and baked for 10 minutes at 350.

Now, many of you know I use Nanny Burke's Buttercream as my go to, but I felt like trying something different yesterday, and besides, who doesn't love Sweetapolita?!? (If you don't know Sweetapolita, go there, right now. She is amazing!!!) I used her recipe for Whipped Vanilla Bean Frosting and I added one teaspoon of Orange Blossom Water which I bought at the Mid-East Food Centre on the corner of North and Agricola. Oh my it was good.

My piping skills still need work, but I still thought these were cute, and far too tasty, not to share.

Lemon Meringue Cupcakes

My friends Erin and Natalie gave me these sweet little cupcake wrappers for my birthday, and I had three mini jars of lemon curd in the fridge, so what better to do than bake cupcakes?

Like I need a reason.

I got the Old Fashioned Vanilla Cupcake recipe AND the Meringue recipe from one of my favourite cookbooks - The Back In The Day Bakery Cookbook. I've made a number of treats from this book and have been pleased with all of the results, including these cupcakes. In fact, I think this could be the perfect vanilla cupcake recipe.

And the meringue? Luscious.

You can get the recipe for the cupcakes at the end of the post, the recipe for the lemon curd here and the recipe for the meringue here. I omit the cream of tartar from the meringue because I really don't like the taste of it.

The cupcake batter was really thick so I used an ice cream scoop to plop a dollop of batter into my cupcake wrappers, then, I fitted a piping bag with a round tip and filled it with lemon curd. I stuck the tip of the piping bag just under the top of the cupcake batter and squeezed some curd into the center of the raw batter. You can see what it looks like after it's baked below.

The piping tip left a small hole in the top of the batter so I added about a half teaspoon more batter to fill it in. 

My wrappers were fairly large so my cupcakes took about 25 minutes in the oven. I let them cool, in the tin, on a rack, about 20 minutes before I piped the meringue because a) I figured the meringue would 'melt' if the cupcakes were still warm and b) the lemon curd inside the hot cupcakes was like molten lava. 

Preheat the high setting of the broiler in your oven and keep the rack in the lower third. Once the broiler is ready to go, pop the tin of cupcakes in and keep a close eye on them, because once they start to turn golden, they'll brown fairly quickly. Mine took about 4 minutes and I rotated the tin a couple of times during those four minutes.

I think next time I may try a different filling - maybe some Dulce de Leche, Nutella or some of the Biscoff Spread I just ordered?

The Back In The Day Bakery's Old Fashioned Cupcakes are truly a perfect blank canvas for any creative flavour combinations you can dream of!!

Back In The Day Bakery's Old Fashioned Cupcakes (18 large or 24 medium cupcakes)

1 C milk (I used 35% heavy cream)

1 tsp vanilla

1 3/4 C cake flour

1 1/4 C all purpose flour

2 C sugar

1 Tbsp baking powder

3/4 tsp fine sea salt

2 sticks butter (227g) , cubed, room temp

4 eggs, room temp

• Preheat 350 - rack in lower third of oven
• combine cream and vanilla - set aside
• combine flours, sugar, baking powder and sea salt in stand mixer - mix with paddle on low 2 minutes
• add butter, a few pieces at a time, until all butter is added and mixture resembles coarse sand
• add eggs, one at a time, mixing after each until well combined
• add cream/vanilla mix slowly - mix 1-2 minutes more to combine
• scoop into cupcake wrappers set in a muffin tin and bake 20-25 minutes

Jumping on the Sprinkles Bandwagon

Since December 29th, I have been getting a lot of work in Halifax, not only as a food photographer, but as a food stylist. Some of my gigs have been food styling only - no photos!! My brain is constantly churning with ideas of how to push myself - learn more, experiment more, try new things. Of course there's nothing new about sprinkles but I was seeing them everywhere a couple of months ago and I just love them, so finally, I decided to jump on the sprinkles wagon (I can't help it - they're pretty!!) Also, baking cupcakes and topping them with pale pink buttercream and sprinkles is an excuse to create a new foodscape in my studio, play with my new hot lights (ps - buttercream does NOT like hot lights), and try to teach myself something new about food photography and styling. I'm still getting the hang of how to light food with studio lighting (it's much harder than I thought it would be!) but I'm workin' on it...