Ginger and Walnut Cupcakes

It has been so long since I did some baking and brought it into work, that I thought I better do some. My poor work colleagues – when we started building the house, the builders got all the baking. Even though we finished that two months ago, I’ve been a bit remiss about bringing in morning tea.

So I decided to bring in cupcakes for morning tea today. Recently I got from the library a NZ book called Divine Cupcakes and it had a recipe in it for ginger cupcakes with ginger caramel icing and little gingerbread hearts on them – it really captured my imagination so I decided to do something similar for morning tea.



I actually used the gingerbread cupcakes from the crapbapple bakery recipe book. I played around with the recipe a bit, using sour cream instead of yoghurt and upping the spice quantities. The cupcakes have a little sliced crystallised ginger in them and also some walnuts which add a bit of interest. I used the divine cupcake recipe for the icing which makes a lovely creamy icing. I made little heart shaped gingerbread using a peggy porshen recipe. I normally use an Annabel Langbein recipe for gingerbread biscuits, but wanted to try something different and I really liked the peggy porshen recipe which uses muscavado sugar in it.

I think the cupcakes look so cute, and I am sure that everyone at work appreciated them too!

Ginger and Walnut Cupcakes (adapted from Crabapple Bakery Cook book)

150g butter
1 ¾ c sugar
4 eggs
1 ½ tsp vanilla
2 tsp grated fresh ginger
2 c flour
¼ tsp b soda
2 tsp ginger
½ tsp allspice
2/3 c natural yoghurt
1/3 c chopped crystallised ginger (I used preserved)
¾ c chopped walnuts

• Cream butter and sugar, then beat in eggs one at a time and lastly vanilla and grated ginger
• Combine dry ingredients and stir into butter mixture alternately with sour cream
• Stir in chopped ginger and walnuts
• Spoon into cupcake cases and bake at 170c for 20-25 minutes
• When cold frost with ginger caramel icing

Caramel Ginger icing

125g butter
200g brown sugar
80ml cream
1 tbsp ground ginger
500g icing sugar

• Melt together butter and brown sugar, then boil for 2-3 minutes
• Stir in cream and ground ginger. Leave to cool until lukewarm
• Mix in icing sugar, leave to cool and then beat until fluffy (I added a bit more cream to loosen the mixture)