Cherry Bakewell Cupcakes

Yesterday I had my birthday party. I rarely go all out for birthdays, but because this was a special one, I hired a pub function room and invited all my friends to come and celebrate with me. Of course, this also meant baking cupcakes! I made the coffee cupcakes again from the previous week, as they were really popular. I also made basic vanilla cupcakes, with 2 colour buttercream icing. This recipe was from the Hummingbird Bakery, and it works really well. I just subbed the butter for Pure Margarine and the milk for Oat Milk.

I chose the icing to match the flowers I decorated the room with. I asked my local florist (which I adore, and not just because their name is Doris Florist) to make small bunches to go into some jam jars that I decorated with hessian. They did a brilliant job!

I wanted a third kind of cupcake, one that didn’t have buttercream icing. After thinking (and browsing Pinterest) for a while I decided on a Cherry Bakewell cupcake.

A Cherry Bakewell Tart has four very distinct parts:

1. An almond frangipane layer
2. A raspberry jam layer
3. A thick layer of fondant icing
4. Half a cherry on top

It is usually encased in a sweet pastry case, but I didn’t want to include that part.

I started by making an almond cupcake with half flour and half ground almonds. However, when I took it out of the oven it had an odd granulated texture. The cake itself was quite dense and sank in the middle. So I went back to the drawing board!

The next batch I made were basic cupcakes with almond extract for the flavouring. This worked perfectly. They were light and fluffy with a satisfying almond taste and smell. Once they were cool, I used a cupcake corer to remove the middle from each cake.

I then filled the holes with raspberry jam, I didn’t want the jam to be too sweet (the cake with icing was going to be overwhelmingly sweet!), so I bought some Bonne Mamon Raspberry Intense, which said it had more fruit and less sugar. I can confirm that it does! It is delicious, not too sweet and packed with raspberries.

I then mixed up icing sugar with lemon juice, to get that thick fondant icing that has a satisfying tart aftertaste. With hindsight, I realised that I should have saved the cupcake cores, so I could cover the jam centres before icing. Once the icing set there was a definite sinkhole where the jam was.

Fortunately, I still had to add the cherries, so I made sure to cover each sinkhole with half a glace cherry. Again, I wanted to try and avoid that overly saccharine taste with the cherry, so I chose the Waitrose Cook’s Ingredients ones, as they were slightly less sweet than the bright red version.

I asked my guests to let me know what they thought and the feedback was very good. Everyone agreed that it tasted very similar to a Bakewell Tart. I’ve already been asked to make them again.