Baby cakes

Laurie’s (who runs the cupcake hero blog challenge) baby, Colby, is turning one and Laurie has issued a baby cupcake hero challenge. The idea was to make a cupcake that would appeal to small children but with none of those things that children can sometimes have allergies to (ie nuts etc).

I don’t have children myself, but I thought about this for a while and thought, well, babies often eat custard and bananas, so I created a banana and custard cupcake. The cupcakes are basically little banana cakes. I am not really a great fan of banana cake, although I love bananas. I think banana cake is sufficiently bland to be baby food! Although I slightly spiced my cake up by adding a little cinnamon, ginger and allspice, but not enough to put a small child off (I don’t think!).



I decided to fill the cupcakes with custard. I did a bit of a cheat here and just used custard powder rather than making custard from scratch. Also, the custard powder meant I could make the custard a bit thicker than usual so that it wouldn’t sink into the cakes. Unfortunately, it also means that the filling is a rather un-natural yellow colour, but maybe that appeals to a child as well!!! The one I cut open wasn’t iced, as I was a bit short on icing.

I had some leftover royal icing in the fridge, which I know is not the best thing to ice cupcakes with, but as I had also made us a nice Valentines meal last night (more about that next week) I didn’t have a lot of time. I was going to decorate the tops with hundreds and thousands, but thought that might look a bit garish, so I coloured a small piece of fondant with blue colouring and cut out stars. You cant really see , but I also used Bob the Builder cupcake cases – very child like!!!! I am actually quite pleased with the look!

Happy 1st birthday Colby!!!!



Banana Custard Cupcakes (makes 10)

65g butter
¾ c castor sugar
1 egg
1 mashed banana
¼ tsp vanilla
125g flour
½ tsp baking soda
¼ tsp each of cinnamon and ground ginger
pinch of ground allspice
¼ c milk
juice of half a small lemon

· Cream butter and sugar, add egg and then banana and vanilla
· Stir in rest of ingredients
· Spoon into cupcake cases and bake at 180c for about 16 minutes
· Cool on rack

Filling

Unfortunately for the filling I didn’t pay too much attention to quantities – I think I sued about ½ c of milk and 1 ½ tbsp custard powder and about 1 tbsp sugar to sweeten. I mixed this all together and then microwaved for a minute, stirred it then microwaved for another minute and the mixture was thick. I let this cool completely before I scooped the tops off the cold cakes, and filled them. Then I iced them with white icing and decorated them.