miss july

hey guys! so, i mentioned my victory at this month's iron cupcake on monday at the end of my last post; because i literally couldn't keep myself from blurting it out. i could, and probably should, have kept you all in suspense for the whole of this post and then dropped the bomb at the end, but i'm just too excited and pleased with myself. when it was announced i properly burst out with 'are you joking???'; not least because the competiton was, as always, totally tough and really exciting.

the theme for this month's competition was cupcakes in disguise (if memory serves, on tamsyn's great call for ideas facebook post, it was actually one of my ideas, which makes it doubly neat that i took the miss july crown). because things have been hitting fever pitch in the garden, i have got fruit and veg on the brain lately, so i had been toying with the idea of a cupcake disguised as part of your 5-a-day (hey if it's good enough for the makers of processed food, right?). i was hoping my courgettes would be ready so i could do a courgette cupcake, with a lime curd filling (the idea for the combo coming from the excellent courgette cake in nigella lawson's how to be a domestic goddess). i'd settled on this idea and not really thought of any others, but sod's law, my courgettes have only just this week started developing fruit bodies, and massive happy yellow flowers (and yes i am going to pop in a gratuitous garden picture, because how could these little lovelies not bring you a smile?):


so, with my courgettes only just bursting into life, i could either defect to imported supermarket ones in a panic (which, if there are alternatives, i really hate doing), think up a new idea, or modify my existing lime idea. being a serious minimum-effort kind of girl, i decided just to modify my lime idea, and go totally citrus with the whole cake. i decided that given that cake decoration is not really my strong point, i'd rely on the 5-a-day disguise idea for adherence to theme and just focus myself fully on getting great flavours going on. i found a recipe for citrus and poppyseed cakes that sounded pretty great, but i couldn't get hold of poppyseeds, so after further moderation, i ended up with citrus and almond cakes, filled with lime curd, iced with a limey cream cheese frosting, and topped with diy candied lime peel. green? they sure were:

let's break this down then. the candied peel is a two day job, as you've got to let it sit and soften overnight. so i got started on my prep on the sunday. the recipe is from my river cottage preserves book, written by my hero pam corbin, and i actually modified it from a recipe for sweets made of chocolate dipped candied orange peel. i know a competiton is hardly the time to be learning a new preserving technique, but whatever man, no pain, no gain:

candied lime peel

4-5 limes
500g granulated sugar
1 tablespoon glucose syrup

scrub the limes, then remove the peel in quarters. to do this, cut through the peel with a sharp knife, going right round the lime, starting and finishing at the stalk. then repeat, at right angles to the first cut. remove the peel, with the attached pith. slice it finely (i used scissors to get long slices i could curl and stuff)

put the peel slices into a large pan and cover with two litres of cold water. bring to the boil and simmer for five minutes drain and return to the pan with one litre of water. bring to the boil, and simmer, covered, for about 45 minutes. add the sugar and stir until dissolved. simmer, covered, for 30 minutes. remove from the heat and leave to stand for 24 hours.

bring the pan to the boil again. add the glucose syrup if using and boil gently, uncovered, for 30 minutes or until all the liquid has evaporated and the peel is coated with a bubbling syrup. remove from the heat and allow to cool. remove the peel and place it on a wire rack with a tray underneath to catch all the drips (this was one of those messy jobs which is really cool/gross/fun to do and you end up covered in syrup) . leave either in a war place like an airing cupboard for 24 hours, or dry in a warm oven for 3 hours (i chose the oven method, as i'm a busy woman, you know)

mine looked like this before they went into the oven, check out how syrupy and drippy they are, it took me aaaages to wash all that stuff off me once i'd got all my peel on the rack:


i made my lime curd on the sunday, too. mostly because i had all the lime flesh from the limes i'd used for the peel pieces and i wanted to use their juice for something (if you're going to use something, you'd best be using all of it if you're in my kitchen, i say). it's a recipe from nigella lawson's how to be a domestic goddess, which i've been making since i was in halls of residence in portsmouth, where there were always recycled pesto jars full of a curd of some sort in my fridge, the moral of the story being don't ever let anyone tell you you can't achieve great things in a limited space. it is literally one of those recipes that's so super simple it's not even funny, but always comes out amazing and impressive; and my top tip is if you ever make a trifle, put in a curd layer of some description either instead of or as well as jelly-it's unexpected and always gets a good reception. anyway:

lime curd

makes 350ml

75g unsalted butter
3 large eggs (always free range organic, you know the drill guys)
75g caster sugar
125ml lime juice (approximately four limes)
zest of 1 lime

melt the butter in a heavy based saucepan, add all the other ingredients nd whisk to a custard over a gentle heat. let cool before filling a jar or cake with it. store in the fridge.

so, ordinarily it's a kind of pale, almost-jade green, but i added a tiny drop of food colouring to mine to get it to this wonderful froggy green colour, because let's face it, iron cupcake is much like my wardrobe, where natural and simple just will not cut the required dash:

also, this stuff has the best wibble known to any foodstuff. if you make some, seriously try wibbling the bowl when it's set, it becomes a compulsion. anyway i popped this in the fridge and exerted a herculean effort not to eat it all with a spoon at 4am or something.

so on monday i had very little to do, just the cakes themselves, and the cream cheese icing. the cake recipe i modified from an australian women's weekly cookbook entitled cupcakes and fairycakes, that my aunt got me for christmas one year. i like the australian women's weekly cookbook series, especially the baking ones, as they're full of interesting ideas and decorating tips, which all get filed on my mental backburner:

almond and citrus cakes

2 tablespoons milk
125g butter, softened
1 teaspoon finely grated lime rind
150g caster sugar
2 eggs (again, always organic, free range)
150g self raising flour
50g plain flour
40g ground almonds
60ml orange juice

preheat the oven to 180 degrees c. line a 12 whole muffin tin with cupcake cases.

beat butter, rinds, sugar, and eggs in a small bowl until light and fluffy.

stir in sifted flours, almonds, and juices. use milk to loosen mixture to soft dropping consistency.

divide mixtures among cake cases, and bake for about twenty minutes. turn onto a wire rack to cool.

and er, that's it. done:

as is usual for iron cupcake, i chose a fairly unadorned, robust sponge recipe. it need to be able to take the weight of a lot of filling and icing, and i didn't want it to compete with the lime flavours i was using in spades. it worked pretty perfectly in the end, and i think tweaking it to include some ground almonds gave my cakes enough body to stand up to the task in hand.

while my cakes were in the oven, i cracked on with my icing, which i made a double batch of so some could be green and some white. i got the recipe for cream cheese icing from nigella lawson's how to be a domestic goddess, too, from her excellent recipe for carrot cupcakes (another classic i've been making since my first year of university). i use this everywhere, in fact i'm sure it's even featured in previous iron cupcake entries:

cream cheese icing

125g cream cheese
250g icing sugar, sieved
1-2 teaspoons lime juice

beat the cream cheese in a bowl till smooth and softened somewhat. and then beat in the sieved icing sugar. squeeze in the lime juice to taste.
here are my two batches, green and white:

and now we come to cupcake assembly. i am still not in possession of a piping bag, so i relied on my ghetto 'cut some cake out, fill and replace', technique for filling the little cakes with curd, like so:

only used about half the curd for filling, so i figured since i was already planning to layer the icing up in a two tone fashion, i'd dump the rest of the curd in with it. i layered up curd, then white icing, then green icing in a freezer bag (which we don't normally have around, i only bought 'em cos of liquid restrictions in luggage when ed and i went to barcelona), snipped a corner off, and squeezed out in spirals on top of my cake like toothpaste, and i got a really need marbled effect in my icing. which i then topped with my lime peel:


so, the evening itself was a blast. my good friend corinne came along to participate in the eating (although i think we've persuaded her to bake next time) and we had a splendid time drinking pink wine and pimms and evaluating all the lovely cakes (and there were some real brilliant efforts there). my favourites, the ones i voted number one on my voting, were these: a kind of cake-f-c thing where someone has made cakes look like a bucket of kfc, and a bucket of chips, beans, and sweetcorn. i think corinne voted for these as number one too, so we were both a bit shocked when my name was read out for first place:

i'm a little confused as to second and third, since it was a tie, and the album doesn't say which cakes it were so in amongst my winner's haze i kind of lost it, but i'm pretty sure one of them was these little fellas:

i didn't catch the name of the lady who made these (although we did have a totally lengthy discussion about citrus curd), but they were really good, dense little lemon sponges, kind of like a fondant fancy if fondant fancies were any good. the eagle-eyed among you might notice that that is my handwriting; i got roped into helping to write out little cards for everybody's cakes when i arrived, so any confusion about names and flavours that there may have been was totally my fault!

and at the risk of this becoming the kirsty's-face-blog, here is me, dazed on my own win and a sugar high of epic proportions, modelling my prizes:

i won a really great book called red velvet and chocolate heartache by harry eastwood (already earmarked several recipes to try; lime and ginger barley water, courgette and camomile cupcakes, lemon and lavender drizzle cake, rosemary and orange drizzle cake, parsnip vanilla fudge, and lemon honey and sunflower seed scones being amongst them), a regency style teacup set that i now drink 'winner's tea' out of on the daily, and two edible glitters, a bold bright purple, and a holographic gold. and er, yeah, i did dress/manicure to coordinate with my cupcakes. whatever, yeah?

the theme for the august one is cupcake cocktails, so my mind is already a-buzz with ideas; i've still got some sloe gin to use up, so the wheels are already working. as ed put it, i've got to defend my title, and let's face it, what kind of barmaid amateur baker would i be if i let that challenge stump me? it was such a good evening that i'm already looking forward to the next one, and much love to boss lady tamsyn at the fishmarket for making it a great evening, not to metion the legions of other bakers for making excellent cakes and always being up for chats about cooking curds, making icing, and where to get pretty cupcake cases. see you all next time around!