Getting liquored!

Laurie’s cupcake hero challenge for February is liquor. I kind of found this a bit hard, as while I am a big wine drinker (a bit bigger than I should be I think!) we don’t really have a lot of “liquor” as such at home. I do like the odd vodka and lemonade, but vodka cupcakes sound like something that an alcoholic would take to a picnic!!!!

However, a few years ago I bought some crème de cassis for making kir royales (a champagne cocktail with cassis and champagne. I am not sure that I made many kir royales, but I did use the cassis in truffles (white chocolate and cassis truffles). Cassis is a blackcurrant flavoured liquer. There are not that many blackcurrants available at the moment, so I decided to make mixed berry cupcakes with a cassis syrup. The results were pretty yummy!!!



I based the cake on a berry & vanilla cake in an Australian Womens Weekly cook book. I made it with frozen raspberries and blueberries (which I had bought fresh and frozen). The ground almonds made the cakes lovely and moist. Initially I made the syrup just with cassis and the sugar syrup, but it tasted a bit like cough mixture!!! So I added the juice of half a lemon which balanced the flavour out nicely. I had a tub of cream cheese in the fridge that was about to expire, so made cream cheese icing which worked with the other flavours. One thing to note is that lite cream cheese does not work for icing. For some reason the lite stuff drips all over the place. You need the full fat stuff!!



I then made the little fondant flowers to top the whole thing off. I am quite proud of the flowers actually!!!

We had the cakes for lunch on Sunday when our friends and their toddler came for lunch. Even little Ava enjoyed them! I’ve called them Kir Royale cupcakes, even though they don’t actually have any champagne in them.



Kir Royale Cupcakes (makes 13 cupcakes)

125g butter
1 c castor sugar
3 eggs
½ c flour
¼ c self raising flour
½ c ground almonds
1/3 c natural yoghurt
2 c frozen berries (I did 1 cup each of blueberries and raspberries)

· Cream butter and sugar, then add eggs, one at a time.
· Stir in remaining ingredients
· Spoon into cupcake cases
· Bake at 180c for about 20 minutes
· While still warm, spoon over a cooled syrup made by simmering 1/2 c sugar and ½ c water together for about 4 minutes, then stir in 2 tbsp cassis and the juice of half a lemon
Ice with cream cheese icing (250g tub cream cheese, juice of half of lemon and enough icing sugar to make a spreadable icing)