Lavender Cupcakes

Can't see anything very appealing about a cake flavored with the stuff you'd normally associate with your granny's bathroom? Put aside those prejudices my friend. Flavoring cakes with lavender is as old as the hills - the Elizabethans used it to perfume theirs (although I don't think they really went in for things like cupcakes). This recipe makes quite delicate, floral cakes, but if you want them to taste more strongly of lavender then you can steep the flowers in the milk for longer, even overnight.

You will need:
120 mls of milk
Some lavender flowers (cut them straight off the bush and give them a little rinse)
120g plain flower
140g caster sugar
1.5 teaspoons of baking powder
Dash of vanilla extract (optional)
40g of butter
1 egg

A couple of hours before I want to make the cakes, I put the lavender flowers into a jug of milk, cover it, and leave it to steep. The longer you leave it, the stronger the flavor. I add a little extra milk so that I can use it for the icing as well, where the taste is slightly stronger.

I preheat my oven to 170c, then I get on with creaming the butter and the sugar together. There's not a lot of butter in this recipe, so it won't be as smooth as normal, so I just cream it until it's all combined and crumby. Then I beat in my egg, and add a couple of drops of vanilla extract. Next comes the flour and the baking powder. I don't bother to sieve it, because my idol Lorraine Pascal doesn't, but you can if you'd like to. I fold in the flour, and then pour the lavender infused milk through a sieve into my batter. I mix it into a soft dropping consistency, where it plops off my spoon if I give it a little shake. I put the batter into my cake cases, and bung them into the oven for 20 minutes. I use muffin cases for cupcakes, but if you want to make fairy cake sized ones then just reduce the cooking time a bit, and be prepared to make about 18, rather than 12.

While the cakes are baking, I whip up my icing. For that, I need:

125g of icing sugar
40g of butter
Food colouring
And a few drops of lavender infused milk.

I beat the butter and the icing sugar together until they're all combined, and it begins to get nice and fluffy. Everything I've read says that you should use a food processor for this, but I don't have one, and I've found that a wooden spoon does the job fine if you use a bit of elbow grease. Look at it like a workout to justify your cake at the end!

Once my icing is nice and soft, I add some food colouring to make it a nice lilac colour. I don't have any purple food colouring, but I do have a bottle of blue and a pot of pink. With a bit of experimentation I get a pretty soft purple, and the added bonus is that by beating in all that food colouring, my icing has got a lot fluffier.

To finish, I beat in the lavender milk and spoon it over the top of my cupcakes. The icing recipe here is actually a half quantity, from the Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook, but I never like a lot of icing on my cakes. If you're the opposite of me, which I know a lot of people are, just double it. I put a little sprig of lavender on the top of each cake, and I'm done. All in under an hour, which gives me plenty of time to eat them.

Cheating at lemon meringue pies

I'm a dirty rotten cheater. The smugness I feel about these little pies is hugely disproportionate to the effort involved. But when they came out of the oven, covered in billowing ivory meringue, I grinned like a maniac. So if you fancy feeling like Nigella, but can't be bothered with the effort, may I suggest these beauties?

You will need:
Melted butter
Six sheets of filo pastry
Some lemon curd
Two eggs
100 grams of caster sugar

See how easy this is? The only thing I made myself is the meringue.

I start by putting on the oven, at 180 degrees c. The recipe says to put it at 160 for a fan oven, which mine claims to be, but I know from experience how rubbish it is.

I plop some butter in a pan to melt, probably using about 50 grams. Once it softens into a golden liquid, I paint it all over a fairy cake tray. Then I get a sheet of filo pastry and cut it up into twelve little squares. I take one square, brush it with butter, and stick another on top. I keep doing this till I've got a stack of six little buttery squares of pastry, one on top of the other. I fan out the edges so that none of the corners are in the same place, so that it gets a cute little crinkly look when it's baked. Then I do the same thing with the other six squares. Then I do it all over again with the other sheets. It sounds boring, but there's something quite relaxing about cutting, brushing and layering. In my head, I'm a methodical French pâtissiere.


Once all my little stacks are made, I put them into the dents in the fairy cake tray, prodding them in gently with my thumb. Then I turn my attention to the filling, which is ridiculously easy. I just separate my eggs, fresh from our chickens Karen and Doris, and mix the yolks with some lemon curd. I probably use about 200g. Then I dollop the curd into the pastry cases, so that they look like a tray full of daisies.

Finally, it's on to the bit that I'm scared of. I've tried to make meringue several times, and it's never ever worked. I can't seem to get the meringue to hold its shape, and become that thick glossy stuff that I wish it could be. It ends up almost liquid, and splats onto the tray. So this time, I'm holding my breath.

I take my electric beater, and start whisking up the egg whites. They soon become fluffy and thicker, but I don't know what the 'stiff peaks' that everyone talks about actually look like, seeing as I've never achieved it. Eventually, I remember that on The Great British Bake Off, one contestant held her eggwhites over her head to check them. I upend the bowl. I'm almost certain I'll be showered in eggy snow, but amazingly they stay. I add the sugar, one spoonful at a time. When it's all beaten in and I can see that my meringue has finally, finally worked, I jump around the kitchen for joy.

It's simple now to spoon a little dollop of meringue onto each tart. I'm sure you could pipe them out and they'd look neater, but I quite like the homely effect. And I don't have a piping bag. Then into the oven they go, for twelve minutes.

And here they are, perfect and oh-so-fragile. They're too beautiful to survive long: a sudden loud noise makes me jump and I crush one. But it still tastes amazing in its crumbled state, sweet and tart and soft and crunchy all at the same time. One happy baker, and hopefully a whole happy family when we have these for pudding tonight.

I Bake

I am eighteen years old. And where my friends like to play on the xbox, or go shopping, or go to gigs, I like to bake. Admittedly, I like all of the things that I've just listed too. But baking is the thing that I really love.

Right now, I am on study leave, supposedly revising for my A levels. This is pretty stressful, and in times of stress, I bake. So much so that I decided to write a blog about it. Something to fill up the long summer ahead of me, to take away some exam stress, and to give me an excuse to bake even more. I can't help it. I just love it.

I'll record all the baking successes on this blog, and the disasters too. I'll take photographs, and you can 'ooo' and feed my smugness, or laugh your head off at my mistakes. I'll include the recipes too, or let you know where to find them at least.

I hope that you'll enjoy the tales of the things I make with sugar and butter, and maybe feel like you want to try some of them out too.

Lots of love,
Lydia x