Katherine's Jaffa Cake Cupcakes

Firstly, I was most excited about January's baking theme - cupcakes! Such a diverse topic, which made my culinary thoughts go into overdrive!!
I have a couple of cupcake recipe books, and ploughed my through, with my brief (that I gave myself) of something a bit bold, classy and tasty!

After much deliberation, the answer I knew, would be found in 'The Hummingbird Bakery Cook Book'. I then went on their website, and saw that this month's special bake on sale were 'Jaffa Cake Cupcakes'. So, i knew this was the one.. the only problem.. no ingredient measurements provided, just an ingredients list. Therefore I thought I'd be a bit bold and improvise!

I selected the Vanilla Cupcake Recipe, which I would tweak ( from 'The Hummingbird Bakery Cook Book', and the Chocolate Frosting recipe from the same book.

Ingredients

For the Sponge:
40g Unsalted Butter
120g Plain Flour
140g Caster Sugar
Pinch of Salt
1/2 tsp Baking Powder
1/4 tsp Vanilla Extract
110ml Whole Milk
1 Egg
The Juice of 1/2 an Orange
The Zest of 1/2 an Orange

Firstly I preheated my oven to 170 degrees and lined a cupcake tin with cupcake cases.

I mixed together the flour, sugar, salt and baking powder, then adding the butter (which I chopped into small cubes to ensure it combined with the flour mixture better) and using a hand held whisk I started to combine all the mixture together.
I then added half of the milk (the original recipe stated 110ml of whole milk, but as I was adding the orange to the mixture I didn't want it to be too runny, so substituted 10ml of milk for orange juice) to the mixture and used an electric whisk to combine. Once this was incorporated, I mixed togther the milk, beaten egg, zest of half an orange, and then juice of half an orange, then slowly added it to the rest of the mixture and whisked together, ensuring that the mixture was smooth, yet not over worked.

I used 2 tablespoon measures to fill the cupcake cases to two thirds full (which they recommend on the hummingbird bakery application). Once all cupcake cases were full, I put them in the preheated oven for 20-25minutes as stated.
I set my timer to 20minutes as my oven is rather hot and didn't want them to burn.

Whilst the cupcakes were cooking (which may I add, the smell of the orange was quite something!) I got to work on the Chocolate Frosting.

Frosting Ingredients
300g Icing Sugar, sifted
40g Cocoa Powder (I used Bourneville Cococa Powder)
80g Unsalted Butter
30ml Whole Milk
10ml Juice of 1/2 an orange

With the above ingredients, I combined them together until light and fluffy, adding the juice of 1/2 an orange for the extra flavour.

Once the cakes were sufficiently cooled, I got to work on the the centre of the cake. For this i used a teaspoon so remove a small 5 pence piece size (in circumference) hole from the sponge, and about half way down - to enable the filling to sit perfectly in the centre and ooze out when bitten - but not seap out of the bottom of the cupcake. I repeated this step on each cupcake - discarding the sponge that was removed. I then used a teaspoon measure of thick cut marmalade and filled the holes made in the sponge. Once all filled with the marmalade I added the chocolate frosting and completed them with a mini jaffa cake.

The taste test proved quite popular, and many were unaware of the marmalade centre - so were more than pleased with the little cupcake surprise.

I would definitely make these again, as they were easy to make, just a tad fiddily, but with the end results and feedback that I received, were highly worth it.