Satch here. Last week it was our friend Reb's birthday and so I felt she deserved a nice birthday treat, particularly considering the fact that she's gluten-intolerant and so rarely gets to eat cake - what a terrible, terrible thing. As a dairy-free kid myself, I know you can still make great cakes without half the stuff you usually put in, so I decided to make my first foray into gluten-free.
One thing Reb and I have in common is that we both like a cocktail or six, so I decided to go all out and do something a bit special: mojito cupcakes!
Unfortunately, I have a distinct lack of photos for this blog post as a) I still have no camera and b) I was making these with a five-year-old so we didn't have the patience to stop and take pictures (for those of you about to report me to the NSPCC, I didn't let her have any rum!)
For these AMAZING cupcakes, you will need:
For the cakes
150g Caster Sugar
150g Dairy-Free Butter
3 Eggs
1 tsp Vanilla Essence
150g Gluten-Free Flour
5 tbsp Milk
(If you don't want to go gluten-free and dairy-free then you can just use whatever fairy cake recipe you normally use.)
Cupcake cases
For the icing
70ml Rum
3 Limes
Soft Brown Sugar
Butter Icing (I tend to just mix it up by taste - you need butter and icing sugar!)
Mint Leaves
Start by preheating your oven at 200 degrees C.
Cream together your butter and sugar and then whack in the eggs (beating eggs is for chumps!)
Add your vanilla essence, flour and milk and stir it all together. The good thing about gluten-free flour is that you don't have to sift it (not that I would bother anyway, but just in case you're into that kind of thing.) The mixture will look a bit more wet than if you'd used gluteny flour, but the nice lady in the health food shop told me that's how it's meant to look.)
Fill the cake cases with the mixture, and pop in the oven for roughly 15 minutes. Get them out and let them cool.
Poke little holes in the cakes with a fork and brush the tops with rum. Let it soak in for a minute, and then go for another brush of rum.
Juice two of your limes and brush the juice on the cake twice, just like you've done with the rum.
Sprinkle on the brown sugar, it should dissolve into the cake. If you're not a big icing fan, you can probably stop here and still have a delicious mojito experience. However, the icing is pretty amazing, so you'll be missing out.
For the icing, add the rest of the rum and lime juice to your buttercream. I have no idea how much buttercream I made, but I didn't use all the rum and lime because it would have been too much. Just keep going by taste and consistency until you get what you want - have an experiment, be an individual!
Once you've iced your cakes (I went for the slap-it-on-with-a-spoon approach as dairy-free buttercream never holds a pretty piping shape anyway), slice up your third lime and place a slice on each cake, along with a mint leaf, and you're done!
The cakes went down a treat and I was mega pleased my first gluten-free bake went so well! If I did them again, I might experiment with adding lime zest, rum and mint to the actual cake mixture, but you still get plenty of mojito flavour doing it this way so crack on! Anyone got any other cocktail cake ideas?
Until next time,
Satch x
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