Week 47: Gingerbread Cupcake Pots with Lemon Drizzle

These cupcakes are from the new 500 Cupcakes "compendium" by Fergal Connolly (a chef and food stylist in London who tested all the recipes for the book). The cupcakes are dense and sticky from the lemon drizzle...but they are so cute in their little pots (which I found at Michael's for $.39 each.)

The pots are a little tricky because you have to cute parchment strips to put in them and sort of press the strips into the pots...two strips each, overlapping. That was a little time consuming since I still have my cast on from my operation...the other problem was that the recipe doesn't say how much batter to put into the pots..so my first batch overflowed and didn't work at all. Tried it again and put in just a 1/3 cup of batter in each pot (i just measured and the pots are 2-1/2 inches high and at the widest point 2-1/2 inches). It doesn't look like much when you put it in, but the recipe uses self-rising flour and baking powder so they do pop up. In a couple of the pots, the batter fell back in which gave it a craggy sort of look...cool!

I did have one fun shopping experience related to this week...the recipe calls for "unrefined brown sugar"...hmmm, I was stumped. Googled it and found into on the Whole Foods web site which led me to Balducci's and the "India Tree Dark Muscovado Natural Cane Sugar....which is milled on the island on Mauritius off the coast of Africa. It has a moist texture, high molasses content, and a strong lingering flavor that goes well with ... gingerbread, etc." You can find it on the web at India Tree...it's in Seattle at 4240 Gilman Place West #B. The fun thing is that when I was in school in London for my senior year abroad, I was friends with a woman who was from Mauritius.

More photos on my flickr account at Week 47.