A hint of mint

It’s more cupcakes on the blog this week! This week we’re baking from the Hummingbird Bakery’s ‘Cake Days’, and the recipe for these cupcakes comes from the Christmas section.

This is one of this recipes where a lot happened. There were ups, there were downs, there was a peppermint essence infused headache. Also I’m not a huge fan of candy canes to be honest, but they seem to be synonymous with Christmas.

The cake recipe is pretty standard, nothing to report here. It’s just a vanilla cupcake recipe but it turned out super light and fluffy so that’s good. Before oven:

All was fine and dandy until I got to the icing. I had two attempts at making these cupcakes after this first fail, so here’s everything that went wrong the first time:

1. Don’t use an electric hand whisk for buttercream.

Fun fact: I’ve burned out the motor in two electric whisks this year by making buttercream, so I should have learned my lesson by now.

Also within about three seconds of starting to make the buttercream, my microwave, hob and floor were covered in icing sugar so that was a pain to clean up. Whyyyyy do I do this to myself.

Note to self: you have a stand-alone mixer… just use that you idiot.

2. Tesco food colouring will not work.

I thought I had some gel food colouring at home, which apparently I do in every colour other than red. But by the time I got to the cake supply store to buy some, the shop was shut, so I just went with my liquid food colouring.

I knew though, I KNEW, that it wouldn’t be good enough as since I’ve discovered gel food colouring, liquid food colouring continues to let me down.

The buttercream was not red. It wasn’t even pink. It was like the colour of a L’Oréal face mask I’ve used once… like a weird terracotta colour I suppose. And I don’t know about you but ‘terracotta’ isn’t the word that springs to mind when I think about candy canes.

So note to self: stock up on gel food colouring and leave liquid food colouring in the past.

3. Sometimes, ignore the recipe

The recipe says to include four teaspoons of peppermint essence. Generally I like to follow a recipe by the book the first time I make it, and then if it’s horrendous or I think there could be changes, I will make my changes if I make it again.

But even when I bought the peppermint essence and smelt it, my immediate thought was how much it smelled like mouthwash. Four teaspoons! FOUR TEASPOONS! CONCERN!

As a number of things so far had already meant the buttercream was substandard, knowing I wouldn’t be serving this particular version of the cake, I did put some of the buttercream on a cake to try it.

Yes it did taste like mouthwash and yes it did give me a headache and I had to go and lie down and watch Brooklyn 99 for an hour and a half.

My breath was wonderful though! Maybe I will use the peppermint essence as actual mouthwash from now on.

Note to self: follow your instincts when I comes to flavour.

Anyway, basically what I ended up with was half white and half weird terracotta pink, mouthwash flavour buttercream.

Sooooooooooo. Take two.

I used my mixer, I used gel food colouring, I used one teaspoon of peppermint extract.

But there were still problems.

Firstly, the icing for buttercream actually didn’t make enough for all the cupcakes, and secondly even though I used one teaspoon of peppermint essence instead of four, I still thought it tasted like mouthwash.

Also in the book it says to sprinkle the cupcakes with edible glitter. I didn’t have any, so I put some non-edible glitter on one cupcake and look how pretty it looks!  So edible glitter is definitely something I need to invest in!

I think the glitter definitely takes the cakes to a whole new level!

Because I couldn’t put the glitter on the cakes, I sprinkled it on the table but that looks rubbish too… this whole thing was a fail I think.

I mean the gel food colouring is definitely better; I think these look the same colour as the candy canes in the picture, and fairly similar to the pictures in the book.

I took them in to work, warning everyone I thought they were very toothpaste-y. The feedback was as follows:

“It’s nice, but I don’t think you’d want any more peppermint in it. And maybe add some dark chocolate.”

“You’ve shown tremendous flair for flavouring, where the recipe said four teaspoons and you went off piste and only added one… and I think you got that right.”

“I’m surprised, but it’s the perfect amount of flavour because no-one wants too much peppermint, but it’s nice to have a little treat.”

“Did it taste like toothpaste? Yes and no.”

“It smells very minty, but the taste, combined with a light, crumbly cake, balances it well. It doesn’t take like toothpaste.”

“It tastes like an After Eight.”

“I don’t usually like icing but I like it because it’s not sickly sweet.”

So apparently they weren’t a fail??

Overall, I just didn’t love these. I may have been scarred from the first set of icing. I’m just not convinced.

HOWEVER. As I said at the beginning, the sponge is really light and fluffy, and I think I would use this again as a vanilla cupcake recipe to replace the recipe I use at the moment.

Here’s one more nice picture of a glittery cupcake.

The peppermint seemed to get the creative juices flowing – here is a picture of one of the cupcakes by one of my colleagues which I think we can all agree is outstanding:

There we go. On to the next baking adventure!