Let them eat cake

Passport & Plate - Ginger & Ale cupcakes

United Kingdom | Monday, March 3, 2014 | 2 photos

Ingredients
2 cups self-raising flour
½ teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons ground ginger
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
pinch ground cloves
Approximately 2 centimetres of fresh ginger, peeled and grated
¾ cup brown sugar
125g butter
Juice of one lime (get some pulp in there too)
3 tablespoons golden syrup
1 egg, lightly beaten
½ cup dark ale

 

How to prepare this recipe
1. Heat the oven to 180 Celsius. Get your cupcake pan ready.
2. Get a mixing bowl and put these things in it, whisking or forking with each addition to keep the ingredients airy: self-raising flour, salt, ground ginger, fresh ginger, cinnamon, cloves and brown sugar. Make a well.
3. In a microwave safe dish or small saucepan, melt the butter. Add the lime juice and pulp, golden syrup, ale and egg.
4. Mix the wet stuff with the dry stuff, beating until you have a smooth batter.
5. Spoon into your cupcake cases.
6. Bake for about 15 minutes, until cooked.
7. Cool on a cake rack.
8. Sprinkle with icing sugar if you want.
9. Enjoy with a glass of the leftover ale.

 

The story behind this recipe
I have baked cupcakes for years, often being commissioned at work to make birthday and other occasion cakes. Buying cake from the supermarket was sacrilegious when I was growing up and I continued to avoid the additive heavy, E number laden cakes once I left home. You should always know what’s in the food you eat and it kind of freaked me out that a supermarket cake will stay soft and moist even if left on a table for three days.

I had just started working on making cupcakes pretty, when the cupcake craze hit Edinburgh, where I was living at the time. I was so excited to see how pretty the cupcakes looked, with uniform towers of piped icing, as they sat in glass cases.

Imagine my disappointed when I bought two of those cupcakes only to find that the cake of my banana and toffee cupcake was a bland boring vanilla and the only banana or toffee part was the icing. I’d made banana and toffee cupcakes the month before, mashing banana and lacing the batter with toffee. The second cupcake was equally unremarkable with the only flavour being in the sugar topping.

I toyed with the idea of a rival cupcake shop, an anecdote to the
bland cake and sweet sugar. I eventually dismissed the idea because I love to travel and having my own business would nail my itchy feet to one location, at least for a bit.

So, I decided to create recipes for cupcakes where the flavour was in the cake and not the icing. I wanted them to be delicious and tasty fresh from the oven, without having to wait for them to cool so you could slather a layer of sugar on them. I knew so many people, especially boys and men, who didn’t like icing and scraped it off cupcakes. They needed cupcakes with real flavour.

My boyfriend did not complain about being experimented upon. His personal favourite was one I wasn't even sure would work out-Ginger 'n' Ale. I loved the sound of the name but I had no idea if putting beer in a cupcake would work. It did and it does. Light, fluffy, and not too sweet.