Make/Bake 4 and 5 Lemon Cupcakes and Jam Doughnut Muffins

Today I decided to make two things - Lemon Cupcakes and Jam Doughnut Muffins. The oven was on for the cupcakes which I wanted to make to use up the  Buttercream icing left over from helping my friend make her sons 2nd birthday cake and I've been dreaming about the muffins since I read about them in Nigella's "How to be a Domestic Goddess". I've lusted over that book for ages and after hinting at several people to buy me it for the last two years I eventually gave in and bought it myself! 

The Lemon Cupcakes were just my standard sponge mix - same amount of eggs, butter, sugar and flour - but with the zest of 1 lemon and some lemon juice. I always start by weighing the eggs still in their shells (always free range, always large) and then use the same quantities of the other ingredients. Since I started using this method (thanks mum) my sponges have NEVER failed (so far). I usually add vanilla or perhaps a few spoons of cocoa or melted chocolate to vary them but today I fancied lemon.

I wanted to practise my icing technique as well, I'm more confident with the more complicated small star work often used to cover cakes but after some successful attempts over Xmas I thought I'd give cupcakes another go. I also wanted to try using two different colours of Buttercream in the icing bag. They also had a lovely sprinkling of glitter and were topped with a slice of jelly lemon.  As I'd kept the Buttercream in the fridge it was far too hard so I warmed it up in the microwave, perhaps a bit too much as it was quite loose which meant my icing wasn't very defined. They did however taste very nice.

I didn't have enough Buttercream to ice all of the cupcakes so I made some into mini lemon drizzle cakes by making a syrup by missing some granulated sugar and the juice of a lemon and then  poured it over the top  of the cupcakes. I used silicon cupcake cases so the syrup was contained!

The Jam Doughnut Muffins can be found on p220 of "How to be a Domestic Goddess". I've never had a lot of luck with muffins, I tend to over beat them and they end up rubbery and sinking. I followed Nigella's recipe exactly and she says to only just mix the ingredients together and not to worry if there are lumps (I had loads). Apparently her recipe does enough for 12 muffins. Either I have HUGE tins or I really overfilled mine as I only managed to make 6. They were huge but they were really delicious. We had them almost straight out of the over after dipping them in melted butter and rolling them in sugar - YUMMY! They tasted like the doughnuts you can buy at the fair. I wonder if they'll be as nice when they are cool.