festive cupcakes

So for today I’ve decided to show you something I actually only tried out today! And that was to make some festive cinnamon flavoured cupcakes with a cinnamon buttercream icing. They actually turned out really well, and tasted super yummy! This recipe is one that I kind of put together myself and winged it whilst I was making it, but it’s pretty simple.

For this you will need all of the following!

To serve 12 –

290g of Unsalted Butter

225g Light Brown Soft Sugar

4 Medium Free Range Eggs

4tbsp of Semi-skimmed Milk

225g of Self Raising Flour

2tbsp Cinnamon

280g Icing Sugar

& last but not least, any decorations you like!

So first of all, obviously put your cupcake holders in the cupcake tin and preheat the oven to 180 degrees. Place 150g of Butter plus the sugar, eggs, and milk in a large bowl until its quite a gooey consistency.

Sift the self raising flour and cinnamon into the bowl afterwards, and mix altogether until it becomes quite thick! You can stir this with a whisk or an electric mixer, however lazy you’re feeling!

And of course divide the mixture into the 12 cupcake cases, making sure it’s spread evenly so they all bake the same. These cupcakes should only take around 25 minutes in the oven, and they should come out a very deep golden brown.

Mine looked like this just before they went into the oven. They look like SUCH a mess, and they are not even at all, so I hope that if you try this you do a better job than I’ve done.

Once they are out of the oven, they should maybe look something like this? ( maybe… )

Hopefully for you, they haven’t exploded or leaked out of the tin and they are actually the same size!

So, the icing is where I started to wing it and didn’t really follow any in-particular recipe.

I started off by using the 280g of Icing Sugar and mixing that with 4tbsp of milk. I then added 150g of unsalted butter, and mixed together until it was quite a thick paste. ( If you want, you can also add about half a tbsp of cinnamon to this mix as well, I did and it was really yum! )

This is where the piping bag came in handy! If you don’t have any, you can always just put a dollop of icing on top of each cup cake but I think piping it on just adds a bit more to it. I used a star shaped nozzle and did a swirl on top of each cake making sure they were all covered evenly. ( AKA, hiding all the horrible bits. ) I then popped on some silver chocolate biscuit balls just to give it a bit of sparkle.

My final product looked like this, and for my first try at baking anything like this I’m pretty friggin’ pleased with myself to be honest!

Thank you for reading and I hope this inspires you to get creative in the kitchen over the festive season.

 

Paige xo

Christmas shopping!

To start off my blogmas, ( that’s one blog post a day! ) I thought I’d talk about shopping. When it comes to Christmas shopping, I tend to be very picky as to picking what to get somebody. Though most of my Christmas shopping is actually done, I still have the boyfriend to buy for. I usually always head along to Brighton to get my Christmas shopping done, as I live in Hastings it’s only a short journey on the train. Last year I got most presents from Brighton, mainly from the lanes. I love the lanes, there are so many small quirky shops with such unique nick nacks that you would never find anywhere else!

To even my own surprise, I haven’t done any shopping in Brighton this time around, and I’ve actually done most of it online! A site that I’m really loving for quirky and personal gifts is www.notonthehighstreet.com. I plan to order sooo much for the boyf from this site, no matter how cringey he’s going to be calling me! ( They’re really sweet gifts, not cringey at all in my eyes! )

Shopping for friends on the other hand is what I found the most challenging. I tried Asos on the gift section, and not going to lie, they had some CUTE stuff but at this point it felt like I was shopping for myself and I could not find a thing that I knew they’d like. Which is when I just told myself to stop being lazy.

Along the seafront in Hastings, we have ‘Old town’ where they have some of the nicest cafes, and small family run shops / bakeries and it’s definitely my favourite place in Hastings. They have one shop that is just full of crystals and spell stones and all sorts of beautiful ornaments and there’s a very overwhelming scent of lavender you can smell as you walk past. It feels really magical in there. If there was ever to be a miniature version of Brighton Lanes this would be it for sure, there’s so much character and history in this part of Hastings!

Along the way I was actually taking photos for a photography project to link with my college course, so this was a great trip out!

I’m not going to give too much away as to what I bought as I want this to be a surprise to my friends, but if you live anywhere near Hastings definitely head to Old Town and get some really cool personal and quirky gifts, that aren’t actually that expensive either!

Paige xo