Home Sweet Home Bakealong 42: Custard Cream Cupcakes

Have you been enjoying the Great British Bake Off? As I type, I don’t know who will win but after a slow start to the series I feel like it’s been a good mix of crazy-mad inventiveness and good solid baking. Ok, chocolate isn’t really baking but we’ll let them off that one.

Cute-as-custard

If you’ve been inspired to bake more, why not join Beckie and me as we bake our way through Hummingbird Bakery’s Home Sweet Home recipe book. You can pick a copy up pretty cheaply and so far it’s been an interesting challenge with some more tricky bakes and some really simple ones.

I’m playing catchup at the moment, hence being a bit out of order with these cupcakes. As usual, the biscuits on the top are entirely unnecessary, but they are pretty and add a bit of oomph to the ever reliable cupcake recipe.

custard-eye-view

True to form I thought I was being organised and sticking to the recipe until I realised that the custard was meant to go inside the cakes, not between the biscuits. It sort of defeats the point of the cakes if there’s no custard in them, but hey-ho! I made half the amount of icing and custard (as you always should with a hummingbird recipe). it turns out that you can’t just halve the flour component for the custard as it gives you a VERY solid custard. Still, it worked well for erroneously using as biscuit-glue!

Ready, steady, BAKE!

Custard Cream Cupcakes
from Home Sweet Home by the Hummingbird Bakery

Ingredients

For the Custard Cream Biscuits (I chilled my dough overnight as Beckie found hers rather soft)
100g unsalted butter, softened
140g caster sugar
1 egg
200g plain flour
1/4tsp cream of tartar

For the sponge
70g unsalted butter, softened
210g plain flour
250g caster sugar
1 tbsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
210ml whole milk
2 large eggs
1tsp vanilla extract

For the custard (I made half)
220ml whole milk
2 large egg yolks
1 tsp vanilla extract
40g caster sugar
15g plain flour
15g cornflour

For the icing (I made half)
660g icing sugar, sifted
210g unsalted butter, softened
60ml whole milk
1 tsp vanilla extract
a few drops yellow liquid food colouring (I omitted this)

The cakes are made the normal hummingbird way, by blitzing the butter with the dry ingredients and then pouring in the wet.

Next up: Chess Pie – see Beckie’s here