Lavender Cupcakes

With Summer blooming in typical British fashion… with rain, it’s time to enjoy the fare that it has to offer. In a recent article for a magazine supplement in The Daily Mail, Jamie Oliver champions the delicate scent and flavour of Elderflowers, however, I’m going to champion the gorgeous Lavender.

Whenever I walk past shrubs of Lavender I just have to brush my fingers over them, bring my hand to my nose and inhale that beautiful aroma. Best known for its calming, anti-imflamatory properties, I can just picture herbalists in rooms full of Lavender, processing the plant in order to gain its essential oils, bottling it  in tiny tinctures. I don’t know about you, but using this purple bloom in food just isn’t the first thing that crosses my mind but there are so many great looking recipes available. The one that caught my eye though was a Lavender cupcakes recipe in a cookbook dedicated entirely to cupcakes that I recieved for a birthday present a few years ago. It is full of ideas for simple, elegant, savoury, the unusual and the usual suspects of cupcakes.

If you fancy making these little beauties yourself, ingredients include:

• 6 lavender flowers, plus extra small sprigs to decorate
• 125g (4oz) lightly salted butter, softened
• 125g (4oz) caster sugar
• finely grated rind of 1/2 orange
• 2 eggs
• 150g (5oz) self-raising flour
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder

and for the Icing:

• 150g (5oz) icing sugar
• 4-5 teaspoons of orange juice
• a few drops of lilac food colouring

To make just mix all the ingredients together; divide the mixture between 12 cupcake cases lining a muffin tray; and bake in a 180 degree preheated oven for roughly 20 minutes; once cooked and cooled, make up the icing and cover the cupcakes, using the remaining lavender flowers to decorate. Simple.

And if you are a big lover of cupcakes and want to make more, this is the book I mentioned where I got this recipe…