My Birthday Cupcakes :)

I know have been lacking in post lately, I will catch up eventually, but here is a pic of my birthday cupcakes - 40 in total ;-)

BTW, the bowl and the trivet were souvenirs bought at the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul specifically for these cupcakes :)

And here are the back up cupcakes :)

And a pic from the party - most turned out not in focus, so this is the best one I had!

OK, so finally time to catch up with some blogging.  So, I turned 40 a week ago - it was hard, very hard - let me tell you! I am not ready for this age at all, but am finally coming to grips with it :)

I saw a picture of what I thought was the perfect cupcake about 6 months ago.  I fell in love with it the moment I saw it (it was one of those little ads on the sidebar on facebook).  It was a chocolate cupcakes in a brown paper liner and frosted with the most gorgeous turquoise color (one of my favorite colors!!!).  I was determined to make these for my 40th.  Problem is, in Germany, it is extremely difficult (and expensive when you do find a way) to get proper cupcakes decorating stuff - the Germans just do not decorate at all like we do!  So, I had a friend bring me over the proper Wilton food gel colors that I need and another one bring over the brown liners - so it was a joint effort for these cupcakes.  Then I needed something to take a picture of them on that made them super special to me.  For my 40th, my lovely Guy and I went to Istanbul for 5 days - it was AMAZING!!!  And on my birthday itself, we walked for hours in the Grand Bazaar and we found the perfect items for my cupcakes. A lovely turquoise/black trivet and bowl.

I also wanted to have a 2nd type of cupcake as well for my party (we celebrated here with friends the following Sat after my birthday) as I wanted to have 40 cupcakes.  So, I made the same recipe - but used some other quite cool cupcake liners that a friend sent me and a cocoa butter cream for those.  All the pics are above.

Here is the recipe I used, which is my basic one I have used for the last few batches, but a few changes.  One major change is I can no longer use soy milk (have intolerance to that now too :(

Chocolate cupcakes

Makes 16 cupcakes

Ingredients:

20 g Quinoa Flour

40 g Millet or Sorghum Flour

40 g Amaranth Flour

20 g Rice Flour

15 g Tapioca Flour

2 tsp GF Baking Powder65 g Dutch Cocoa Powder

1/4 tsp salt

40 g Milk Free Margarine softened

150 g Muscovado Sugar

2 eggs

1 tsp GF Pure Vanilla Extract

1/2 cup Sheep’s Plain Yogurt

1/2 cup Rice Milk

Directions

Preheat oven to 180°C

Line cupcake pan with liners

Mix all dry ingredients and sift together several times.

Mix all wet ingredients until smooth.

Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients and mix until smooth and thoroughly mixed.

Bake at 180°C for 20min.  Allow to cool 10 min in pan and then remove and place on wire rack to completely cool before frosting. 

I used the same wilton butter cream frosting I always use, with Wilton food coloring gels.  A mixture of Sky Blue and Lemon Yellow (adjusting back and forth until I got the perfect Turquoise)