Limoncello Cupcakes

 

 

I was given some limoncello for Christmas; I like drinking it but also baking with the liqueur which I've done before when I made these cookies and macarons. What I haven't made yet is limoncello cupcakes - until now!

 

Recently we had some last-minute visitors who came round to see our new house. About 40 minutes before they arrived, I thought it was a shame I didn't have any cake to offer them and wondered if I could whip up a small batch of cakes in just over half an hour. It turns out you can, but only just!

 

I used a recipe from a book called Make Bake Cupcake, which has some really inventive cupcake recipes. As usual, I changed the recipe a bit. Here's what I did to make six cupcakes:

 

You need:

90g self-raising flour

60g butter, softened

100g caster sugar

1 egg

3 tbsp. milk

3 tbsp. limoncello

for the frosting:

1 egg white

75g granulated sugar

2 tbsp. limoncello

100g icing sugar

100g butter, softened

 

Preheat oven to 180C and line a 6-hole muffin tin with cake cases. I used yellow to go with the lemon flavour.

 

Cream the butter and the sugar then add the egg and mix well. Fold in the flour then add the milk and limoncello and beat well.

 

Spoon the mixture into the cake cases and bake in the oven for 18-20 minutes. Allow to cool afterwards.

The recipe for the frosting didn't quite work for me so I ended up adding a lot of icing sugar though I wasn't supposed to. This isn't a buttercream exactly -even with the icing sugar it has a slightly different consistency and tasted really good.

Put the egg white and sugar in a heatproof bowl set over a pan of simmering water and whisk until the sugar has dissolved. Remove from the heat and whisk for five minutes. Add the butter and whisk until you have soft peaks. Add the limoncello then add as much icing sugar as you need to make it a spreadable consistency so it isn't too runny.

Swirl the icing onto the cupcakes. It was at this exact moment that our visitors arrived so I quickly slapped some icing on each cake with a spoon and didn't have time to make them look pretty! They did taste good though.

I'm sending this to Alphabakes, the blog challenge I co-host with Ros of The More Than Occasional Baker, as the letter she has chosen this month is L.