Easter Nest Cupcakes

 

I wanted to make Easter cupcakes. My first thought was Simnel cupcakes. I was thinking a lightly spiced, fruited cupcakes with lots of currants and candied peel, topped with almond flavour buttercream and a ball of glazed marzipan. Actually they sound pretty good! But I decided that, being v non religious, Easter is about chocolate! And the idea of nests came into my head. They’re ultra simple and tasty. Topped with mini eggs, they become v Easter like. Vanilla cupcakes so its not all chocolate and a little chocolate buttercream to help the nests stick. And once I got the ideas into my head, that was it! I had to make them!

Weirdly, I don’t have a good vanilla cupcake recipe yet so a quick google furnished me with the Magnolia Bakery one.

1 ½ Cups Self Rising Flour
1 ¼ Cups All-Purpose Flour
1 Cup (2 sticks) Unsalted Butter, softened
2 Cups Sugar
4 Large Eggs, at room temperature
1 Cup Milk
1 tsp Vanilla Extract

1. Preheat oven to 350˚F.
2. Line two 12-cup muffin tins with cupcake papers.
3..In a large bowl, on the medium speed of an electric mixer, cream the butter until smooth. 4. Add the sugar gradually and beat until fluffy, about 3 minutes. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. Add the dry ingredients in 3 parts, alternating with the milk and vanilla. With each addition, beat until the ingredients are incorporated but do not overbeat.

5. Using a rubber spatula, scrape down the batter into the cupcake liners, filling them about ¾ full. Bake for 20-25 minutes, or until a cake tester inserted into the center of the cupcake comes out clean.

6. Cool the cupcakes in the tins for 15 minutes. Remove from the tins and cool completely on a wire rack before icing.

I followed the recipe to the letter. Easy. I’m told the cakes tasted quite eggy. I felt they were slightly eggy but not too much so. The whole eggy thing makes me fairly curious so I’ll probably try devote some time soon to testing various vanilla cupcakes to see if this is a Magnolia Bakery thing or a vanilla cupcake thing.

For the nests, I melted some chocolate. I have no exact measurements for the nests but I melted a 200g of dairy milk, minus one square that was eaten, purely for testing reasons! I poured some cornflakes into a bowl. I have no idea of how many! I just poured in what felt like a good amount! Here they are waiting for their chocolatey doom…

And here they are after meeting it…

So, probably too many cornflakes for the chocolate! But I pressed on. The original idea was to hand mold nests and leave them to dry on parchment paper but that proved impossible! So I spooned them into cupcake cases and put them in the fridge to set.

The teeny weeny eggs are from ASDA and are so freaking cute! When the nests were set, I made a bog standard chocolate buttercream, again no measurements, just butter, cocoa, sugar and a splash of milk…

I topped the cupcakes with a small amount of buttercream.

then removed the paper cases from the nests and rested them on top, squishing them down a little to make sure they’re stuck. Make sure they go back in the frost before you eat them as it helped the nests to harden up again and makes them easier to eat cos everything is stuck tight!

Apart from the eggy cakes issue, these were delish and I was really pleased with the way they turned out. V Eastery!

Happy Easter!

L x