Recipe: Coffee And Walnut Cupcakes

Whenever I ask family and friends what cakes they’d like me to bake, coffee and walnut cake almost always tops the list. However because I’ve never been a fan of the flavours combined I’ve never made it for them. But as I’m enjoying a week off work and needing to keep myself busy, I thought I’d finally give it a go.

Ingredients
For The Cupcakes
-100g Stork
-100g Caster Sugar
- 100g Self Raising Flour
- 20g Cocoa Powder
- 2 Eggs
- 2 Tsps Chocolate Extract
- 1 Tsps Coffee Extract

For The Buttercream
- 200g Unsalted Butter, softened
- 320g Icing Sugar
- 1 Tsp Vanilla Extract
- 1 1/2 Tsps Coffee Extract
- A Splash Of Milk
- Walnut Halves To Decorate

Method
1- Pre heat oven to 180C. Line a twelve hole muffin tin with paper cases.
2- Into a bowl place the caster sugar and stork. Cream together until pale and fluffy in texture.
3- Add one egg and a tablespoon of flour. Beat until combined and then repeat with your second egg and another tablespoon of flour.
4- Fold in the flour, coffee extract, cocoa powder and chocolate extract. Fold instead of beat so that all the air you’ve just built into the mixture isn’t knocked out and you don’t end up with a tough, chewy cake.
5- Spoon the mixture into your prepared cases and bake for 20-22mins or until the top springs back when pressed. Leave to cool in the tin for five minutes and then transfer to a wire cooling rack to cool completely.
6- Now it’s onto your buttercream. Place your softened unsalted butter into a clean bowl and beat until pale and soft.
7- Sieve in half of your icing sugar and beat until fully combined. Scrape repeatedly along the sides of the bowl and down your spatula, beater or wooden spoon so that there isn’t any little pockets of butter or icing sugar sitting unmixed in your buttercream.
8- Sieve in the remaining half of your icing sugar and beat until fully combined. Now is the best time to add your milk if you need to. It’ll help to loosen the buttercream if it’s too stiff to pipe or spread.
9- Beat in your vanilla and coffee extracts. On its own the coffee extract makes the buttercream strong and a little bitter but the vanilla helps to sweeten it and give it a nice little twist.
10- Spoon  your buttercream into your piping bag fitted with a piping nozzle of your choice. I went with the JEM1D nozzle as it gives a nice loose swirl that gives even the wonkiest looking cupcakes a classy finish.
11- Pipe onto your now cooled cupcakes and top with a walnut halve. Then all that’s left to do is let them set and enjoy.