Happy nearly Easter everyone! and here's to a 4-day week!
Scrolling though all social media from Instagram to Pinterest, it's hard to imagine there's anything more to Easter baking than Mini Eggs and chocolate. Well, we're here to change that! After giving up chocolate for lent, we've had to stray from the chocolate Easter treats for now and so, we introduce you to these gorgeous little carrot cake cupcakes.
A delightfully spongey carrot cake topped with lemon buttercream, crushed pecans and cute little carrot! Absolutely divine, and perfect for an Easter celebration, these cupcakes are soooo quick and easy to make, there's just no excuse!
Ingredients:
For the cupcakes...
3 medium carrots, peeled and grated
80g butter
80g golden syrup
100g soft light brown sugar
2 eggs
150g self-raising flour
1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 tsp ground cinnamon
pinch of salt
For the buttercream...
4oz butter
9oz icing sugar
1 tbsp lemon juice
For decoration...
Handful of pecans, chopped
orange icing
parsley
Preheat your oven to 200°C/180°C Fan/Gas mark 6 and line a cupcake tray with 12 cupcake cases.
Place the butter, sugar and golden syrup in a large saucepan and melt together over a medium heat, stirring to combine. Remove from the heat once fully melted, and then stir in the flour, salt, bicarbonate of soda, ground cinnamon, grated carrot and eggs. Mix well until fully combined.
Divide the mixture between the cupcake cases and bake for 20 minutes until risen, golden brown and an inserted skewer comes out clean. Transfer to a wire rack and set aside to cool completely.
While they are cooling you can begin to make your buttercream. In a large bowl, beat the butter until light and creamy and then add in the lemon juice. Beat in the icing sugar one spoonful at a time until smooth. If you feel the buttercream needs to be thicker, just add extra icing sugar until you feel happy with the consistency. Spoon the buttercream into a piping back fitted with a star nozzle.
When the cupcakes are cool, pipe the buttercream onto the cupcakes, swirling from the middle outwards to get a slightly flatter top than the usual swirled cupcake.
Chop a handful of pecans - or other nuts of your choice - so that you have a mixture of sizes and pour these onto a plate. Then, carefully roll the edges of your cupcakes in the chopped pecans.
For decoration, we made these little carrots out of icing and topped them with little leaves of parsley. Obviously you don't really want to eat the parsley with the cupcake so mint leaves would be another great option, but we thought the parsley looks most carrot leaf like. If you'd rather take a shortcut then you can buy icing carrots from Tesco but nothing beats homemade.
Carrot Cake is definitely an under-rated cake and we forgot just how much we love it until we tasted this moist, spicy but sweet delicious-ness. And the pairing of the carrot cake and lemon buttercream is something not to be missed! Also, how cute are these tiny carrots?!
We hope you love these cupcakes as much as we do, so please let us know if you give them a go!
Thank you so so much for reading this post!
Please let us know if you give these a go, by tagging us on any of our social media (all links are at the top of the page or in a box to the side!)
Seeing pictures of you baking our recipes is always so exciting!
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Happy Easter, lots of love,
Antonia and Imogen x
