December has arrived and with it has a arrived a flurry of Christmas events and activities. This weekend has been packed for us, with our Church Christmas Fair, a birthday party and planning meetings for the Carol Service that will soon be upon us. On top of that, Orla has been steadily coming down with a cold and spent most of the day cuddling up to Rob or me on the sofa. Poor kid!
I decided that we needed a little baking pick-me-up this weekend so I browsed my Christmas Pinterest Board (I am still in love with Pinterest!) and found this tempting treat:
They looked great but the gingerbread-latte cupcake recipe was an American one, and I didn’t trust myself to do the conversions. So I did a bit of googling and found a UK version here on Baking with Granny. It was a simple recipe and I had nearly all of the ingredients all ready in the cupboard. All I had to do was pick up some butter and mini gingerbread men. Although I did substitute the treacle for butterscotch caramel because my treacle had expired last month!
Here is how my version turned out:
The first thing you might notice is my icing style is rather rustic. I have a problematic relationship with icing bags. I dutifully set up the icing bag with full confidence that this time I would nail it, only to find the mixture was too thick to go through the nozzle. I decided to spoon the icing out of the bag and on to the cupcakes in little mountains instead. One day I will master the icing bag, but it was not this day!
I absolutely loved the sponge mixture in this recipe. It baked really well, achieving a good height and colour in twenty minutes in the oven, and it has a lovely gently spiced taste. Sweet and warming. It tastes like Christmas to me!
Final touch was a spray of edible glitter that I forgot we had until after I had taken the first two photos. These have made a great treat to unwind with in the evening and I got to share them with one of the kids groups at church this morning which was lovely. After all, half the fun of baking is then sharing out the good afterwards! And then you can bake more things!
I have my eye on these Christmas Tree Brownies for my next bake!
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