Adventures in gingerbread – part two

And just like that, we’ve made it to part two of the gingerbread series – a day I’m sure many of us thought would never come.

I’m still deciding whether or not this will be a three-part series. If you haven’t read part one, please do pop over here and have a read about my gingerbread stars.

This blog is all about gingerbread cupcakes! Which I am making because I have some adorable gingerbread man sprinkles!

The recipe is from one of my trusty Hummingbird Bakery books. The book has lots of different sections about occasions that might require cake (which I would say is all the occasions) and this recipe is in the Christmas section.

I was surprised that this is a really liquid cake batter; along with the standard eggs/butter/flour/spices/black treacle/golden syrup, it has hot milk in it.

Because the batter was so liquid, I think the cakes sank a bit when I got them out of the oven, so I probably could have got away with filling the cases a bit higher.

Also the recipe says to put a whole teaspoon of salt in the mixture… a teaspoon of salt is quite a lot, I would say. So I only put half a teaspoon in and I think that was the right decision.

Who loves a photo of a decoration station (yes it’s a thing)? Me! So here you go…

The icing is cream cheese buttercream with lemon zest in it, which works really well with the flavour of the cupcakes. I obviously ate one the night I’d baked them, before I’d decorated them, and I thought it was really strong. But, similar to my Christmas cupcakes, the next morning the flavour had mellowed.

I’ve not really got anything else to say other than this was another successful Hummingbird Bakery recipe – they don’t seem to let me down, so I’d really recommend their cookbooks. This recipe was from ‘Cake Days’.

People at work seemed to like them too, so here’s a load more pictures.

Do you like my adorable gingerbread man tree decoration? I got him a few years ago as part of a Secret Santa, and I had to include him in the photo shoot 🙂

I didn’t pipe the icing, I tried to do a swirl to copy the picture from the book – not sure whether they look like the pictures in the book, but hey, I’m not a professional cake decorator. I think some look better than others but all in all, I am quite pleased with how they look.

Now, at this stage I still have a part three planned for this series… I am a bit nervous about it! So let’s see what happens.