Beehive Cupcakes

When I first saw these cakes in my recipe book, they literally jumped out at me. They look so nice with the yellow frosting (mine is white cos i neglected to buy any food colouring... error) and the chocolate bee ontop. They also taste delicious.

I've decided on reading other blogs, that I might as well put the recipes on here so you can try them too! Here goes:
  
Cake - makes 16

200g (7oz) unsalted butter, soft
185g (6.5oz) soft brown sugar
3 eggs
115g (4oz) warm Honey
280g (10z) Self-raising Flour

1. Preheat the oven to 180*C, and line 16 muffin holes with cases. (I made 24 normal-size cupcakes instead of muffins).
2. Beat the sugar and butter together until light and creamy.
3. Fold in the eggs one at a time, then the honey and flour until combined.
4. Divide into the cases, and bake for 18-20 mins. Cool on a wire rack immeadiately after baking.

Icing - This stuff is really really tasty, just like marshmallows :) the recipe i provide below did make rather alot of icing, though it might just be that I piped it on really sparingly!


Icing

3 Egg whites
330g (11.75oz)
2 tsp glucose syrup
pinch of cream of tartar
1 tsp vanilla extract
yellow food colouring
Toothpicks
Chocolate bees (see previous post)

1. Combine the egg whites, sugar, glucose syrup and cream of tater and 100ml of water in a heatproof bowl.
2. Sit the bowl over a pan of simmering saucepan and beat with electric beatiers until light and fluffy.
3. Remove from heat and add the vanilla extract and beat until it forms stiff peaks (seriously use electric beaters, I tried this by hand - it took FOREVER).
4. Add the food colouring drop by drop.

Spoon the icing into a piping bag with a 1cm round nozzle (very messy - stupidly i forgot to take photos of this.. but it was nice to lick it off my hands afterward :) ) and pipe in circles onto the cake to resemble a beehive, push the toothpick into the bottom of the bee and insert into each cake. I personally think these cakes could do without the icing, as nice as it is, but I can't decide what to put on top instead.


I had loads of leftover icing (because I didn't pipe it on in huge quantities like the recipe says to), so i used it to make little meringue-style pieces of marshmallow on a sheet of baking parchment. They haven't exactly hardened as I'd have liked, but are still very tasty. Tomorrow I'm going to see what heating them up a bit does :D even if it does fail miserably, at least i'll have a nice sticky sweet mess to eat, and no one that I'd have to share it with!


MMFC