Boston Creme Cupcakes

Strangely, I'm not that into cupcakes, I like them, but I don't get an awful lot of satisfaction from making them. But these ones are just so good, it is a recipe I got from the Hummingbird Bakery "Cake Days" book. When I was last in london I went to the Hummingbird bakery and I wasn't really loving it. The selection seemed really small, and what we did get was good, but not amazing, and nothing I couldn't do myself, but this book has some really good recipes. I'm going down to London again at the end of the month so am hoping to try the Primrose Bakery, see how that shapes up.

I also got a new piece of kit, this breville stand up mixer. My old hand mixer had burnt out, and I was just going to get another one, but then I got some money for Christmas and decided to put it to good use. This was £60 down to £45 in the sale, and its no Kitchenaid, and isn't the most beautiful appliance, but it is SO much better than a hand mixer.

One annoying point is that it can miss a few bits at the bottom of the bowl, something I learnt the hard way, unmixed cake batter- the horror. But other than that I am really happy with it, leaves me free to potter about when things are mixing which is always a bonus.

I also got this for christmas from my sister, its a flour dredger, so it sieves the flour as well as making it really easy to gradually add, an invaluable piece of kit as I often skip the sieving due to laziness/ending up getting it all over the kitchen rather than in the bowl.

Whisky man came back in order to help me make the custard "creme" bit of this recipe, (milk, egg yolks, cornflour, plain flour and vanilla), which needs to be cooled before piping it into the cakes, as I am the worlds most impatient person I hung the bowl out the window to speed up the process, luckily there were no opportunistic squirrels

Then it just needed to be piped! I use disposable piping bags, I have had proper ones before but they are a pain to clean and can sometimes split, much easier to just chuck them out and also means you can fit any nozzle into it rather than just that paticular brand.

I had ran out of cocoa so had to make a late night visit to the shop at the end of the road and they only had rubbish cocoa so the frosting wasn't quite how I wanted it to be, but it was still nice enough.

Making cupcakes also gave me the opportunity to use my beautiful cake stand that my friends Charlie and Warren got me, normally it has apples etc on it!

Soph x