Gingerbread Yumminess

My friend at the office, Sandra, has been asking me for a long time to make her gingerbread cupcakes with cream cheese frosting. The Gingerbread Pots recipe in my new cupcake book (see yesterday's blog) looked really good, so I gave it a try. Besides which, I have to get cracking if I'm going to try all 500 recipes!

The book suggests making these dense, sticky gingerbread cupcakes in terra cotta pots, but they turned out beautifully in normal cupcake papers.

For the gingerbread:

150g (5oz) self-raising flour

150g (5oz) wholemeal self-raising flour

1 tbsp baking powder

4 tsp ground ginger

1 tsp cinnamon

115g (8oz) light brown sugar

2 eggs

115ml (4 fl oz) honey

115g (4oz) unsalted butter, melted

175ml (6 fl oz) milk

2 tbsp roughly chopped crystallised ginger

For the drizzle:

125g (4 1/2 oz) icing sugar

5 tbsp lemon juice

Preheat the oven to 175 degrees C (350 degrees F / Gas mark 4). 

Sieve the flours, baking powder, ginger and cinnamon into a large bowl. In a medium bowl combine the remaining ingredients and beat with an electric whisk until smooth. Stir into the dry ingredients. Spoon the batter into cupcake papers.

Bake for 20 minutes. Remove from the oven and cool for 10 minutes. Then remove the cupcakes and cool on a rack. To make the drizzle, sieve the icing sugar into a bowl and slowly add the lemon juice, stirring until just combined. Drizzle over the tops of the cupcakes.

The book says the recipe makes 1 dozen, but I got 2 dozen decent size cupcakes out of the batter.

For the cream cheese frosting I simply whipped up a container of cream cheese until it was smooth. Add sifted icing sugar little by little until you get the consistency you want. I wanted the frosting to be a bit on the runny side, so I added a little bit of lemon juice. I found the lemon in the frosting and the drizzle cut the sweetness of the cupcakes a bit.

Can't wait to see Sandra's face when she bites into one!

Happy baking!