Easter Cupcakes

I went a bit mad baking this weekend, as well as making Blueberry Muffins my son and I got a big adventurous and decided to make some Easter cakes. I had great plans to make chocolate nest cakes as well but we ran out of butter, so that may be a project for next weekend.  I decided to base these cakes on the classic Easter Simnel cakes which is a light fruit cake with marzipan in the middle. I was a bit concerned that fruit cake would not translate well to a cupcake so this is a citrus variant on the theme.

Ingredients

• 4 oz (125 g) butter
• 3 oz (75 g) caster sugar
• 3½ oz (100 g) self-raising flour
• 2 eggs
• 1½ teaspoons baking powder
• 2 oz (50 g) ground almonds
• rind of one lemon and one orange
• Marzipan

Method

1. Mix the butter and sugar together until you get a nice soft mixture.
2. Add the rest of the ingredients and mix until smooth and creamy.
3. Roll out the marzipan and get twelve round shapes. I used a very small biscuit cutter but if you are clever you could make a long sausage shape and slice it.
4. Spoon a little bit of the cupcake mixture into cupcake cases. Add a marzipan slice on top and then cover with the rest of the cake mixture. You can see what I mean in this picture:
5. Bake in a pre-heated oven at 180C, 350 F, Gas Mark 4 for about 25 minutes, until they are firm.

Now to decorate them. Simnel cakes normally have marzipan on the top so I decided to do a variety of lemon icing and then stick a marzipan decoration on top.  To make the icing I mixed 2 oz (50g)  icing sugar  with a couple of teaspoons of lemon juice and drizzled over the cakes.  In the meantime my son made marzipan rolls and then we stuck these on the cake. This is the finished result:

They are not the most elegant looking cakes in the world but they tasted absolutely delicious.