Yesterday it was my friend's birthday gathering at her lovely new house. Usually, when there is a house party, particularly if birthday related, I like to bring some cake along. This time i needed to make something quite quickly because i was at work in the morning, and only had a couple of hours turnaround before my lift to the party, including time to go shopping for ingredients.
I did a bit of research at work. Initially i thought of making a chocolate fudge cake, but then i realised this would take too much time to bake the cake, and wait for the topping. Cupcakes are much quicker, so i started having a look at cupcake recipes. When I came across some Little Louise cupcakes, I just new I had to give them a go- my friend whose birthday it was is called Louise :)
Basically, Little Louise cupcakes are plain vanilla sponge cupcakes with a jam filling. The cupcakes turned out pretty good:
Then a meringue topping is applied to the cakes, and they are popped in the oven for 35 minutes or so to bake. If I'd have had more time, I would have put a bit more care and attention into tidying up the topping, but then i suppose they do have a sort of rustic charm about them.
They don't make for the prettiest cakes, but they did taste really quite good, and were happily received by my friends. I sprinkled them with edible gold powder and put them on a nice new pink cake stand to pretty them up a bit. The recipe i used was from the good old BBC Good Food website. I halved the amount of milk in the recipe based on the comments that the jam fell to the bottom of the cakes. The resulting mixture was sturdy but easy enough to transfer into the cupcake cases and spread over the jam. I also left out the dessicated coconut because i wasn't sure if everyone would like it.
These little cakes are definitely worth a try. I would probably recommend eating them with less wine than i did, as I've ended up with an utterly horrendous hangover today.
