St Patricks Day Cupcakes!

I’ve made these because I’ve never really done anything before to celebrate St Patricks Day, as I don’t have any Irish connections within my family or friends.

I bought these cute little shamrock sprinkles online and I thought it was about time I used them, so I made the recipe using Nigellas Chocolate guinness cake recipe with the cream cheese frosting, the recipe can be found on Borders.

You could halve the recipe as I got 36 cupcakes out of it, which wasn’t really a hardship as I’ve given most of them away as I had intended.

Old Fashioned Chocolate Cake!

This has to be one of the best cakes in Feast, Nigella knew what she was doing when she included this cake in the chocolate cake hall of fame, its probably the only chocolate cake you can eat slice after slice of and not feel sick. The sour cream just works so well at cutting the sickly feeling that chocolate and sugar can leave you with, if you’ve never made this cake you have to give it a go.

For the cake:
200g plain flour
200g caster sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
40g best quality cocoa
175g soft unsalted butter
2 large eggs
2 teaspoons real vanilla extract
150ml sour cream

For the icing:
75g unsalted butter
175g best quality dark chocolate, broken into small pieces
300g icing sugar
1 tablespoon golden syrup
125ml sour cream
1 teaspoon real vanilla extract
sugar flowers, optional

Take everything out of the fridge so that all the ingredients can come to room temperature, preheat the oven to gas mark 4/180° and line and butter two 20 cm sandwich tins with removable bases.

Now all you have to do is put all the cake ingredients into a food processor and process until you have a smooth batter.

Spread between the two tin and cook for around 35 mins, start checking at 25.

Remove the cakes from the oven and onto a wire rack

To make the icing, melt chocolate and butter in a bowl over a pan of hot water.

While the chocolate and butter are cooling, sieve the icing into another bowl.

Add the golden syrup to the cooled chocolate mixture, followed by the sour cream and vanilla, mix and then add the icing sugar.

Spoon some of the icing over the bottom layer of the cake, allow it to set for a minute before placing the other cake on the top, spread more icing over the top and using a spatula spread it around the sides until all of the sponge is covered with icing.

Now add the flowers if you wish.