Orange Sunset Cupcakes

Hello Lovelies! First of all sorry for not posting for ages, I’ve been on holiday with my family in South-East Asia. We all stuffed ourselves silly with char kway teow, pad thai, pineapple rice and lots of delicious food, so I was temporarily banned from baking anything when we got home (at least 4 pounds fatter). We also ate a fair amount of desserts, pandan cake, coconut sticky rice and these wicked macaroons from Singapore…so stick around and you might see a few inspired recipes popping up.

Of course the most exciting source of baking inspiration right now is the new series of The Great British Bake Off! Hands down, one of the best programmes ever. I want to employ Mel and Sue to run around my kitchen. The first episode’s Showstopper bake was a hidden surprise cake. They all looked amazing and I felt so sorry for poor Natasha whose sunset cake wasn’t quite baked enough because it’s SO easily done. As it was I liked her idea of a hidden sunset the most so I thought I’d try it out in a cupcake.

You’ll see from the pictures that there isn’t a huge difference between the two lighter colours when baked so when I try this recipe again I’m going to keep experimenting until I get the perfect combination!

Ingredients

4 eggs

8oz self-raising flour

8oz caster sugar

8oz softened butter

2 tsps baking powder

Zest of 1 orange

Red/yellow/orange food colouring

Icing

Large pat of butter

Large pat of cream cheese

Lots of icing sugar

Juice of the orange

Food colouring

Preheat the oven to 180⁰C. Line a muffin tray with cases.

In a large mixing bowl combine the flour, sugar, baking powder, eggs and butter to form a smooth mixture.

Finely grate the orange zest and add it to the mix.

Split the batter evenly between 3 bowls.

I didn’t have any orange food colouring which would have made life a great deal easier so what I did was first made all the mixtures the same shade of yellow. I then added one drop of red at a time to each bowl so that in the end I had a dark, normal and light orange mixture.

I then spooned the mixture into the muffin cakes going dark to light. It’s quite difficult to only spoon a small amount in but completely cover a layer so my cupcakes are absolute monsters. If you wanted smaller, more delicate cupcakes you could pipe the batter in to overcome this, but I personally think that’s a bit of faff.

Bake the cupcakes for 20-25 minutes or until springy and a toothpick inserted comes out clean. Cool on a wire rack.

To make the icing beat the butter and cream cheese together. Sieve some icing sugar, and then add a spoonful of the orange juice. Keep repeating this until the consistency holds its shape but it’s still smooth. Spoon about a third of the icing into a separate bowl and add enough food colouring to make it whatever shade of orange you fancy.

To get the sort of two-toned effect you need to squide the orange icing up one side of the bag, then sort of splodge the white icing to fill the gap. Then pipe away!

I’m a bit of a colour/glitter/sparkly pretty thing baker so I would definitely try these again playing around with different colours. Also as a warning, eating a whole one of these if they are as monstrous as mine will make you feel a bit ill.