Raspberry Cream Cheese Cupcakes

Considering this blog was partially meant to be a way to share recipes, I have been remarkably quiet on the cake front as of yet. So here's a nice spring-ly simple little cupcake for the gorgeous weather we've been having today. Admittedly they aren't the most beautiful things in the world, I made them in a rush a few weeks ago so didn't have time for pretty photos, but believe me they taste light and sunshiney. Or don't believe me...and try them out for yourself!

These are adapted from the ‘Goodfood Baking’ magazine but I didn’t really have to change them very much (I’d only just started using cream cheese in baking so didn’t want to risk much) I just made them a little bit healthier, and added lovely fresh raspberries in.

 These could be made with any sort of jam (or indeed lemon curd; that idea courtesy of my fellow baking enthusiast and her ‘jar full of sunshine’ curd) The recipe says it makes 12 standard size, but as you can see it did a few more than that so I made a mixture of normal sized ones and mini ones. The normal sized were made to try out some reusable silicone cases that the lovely people from my course bought me at the end of last term. I do like having paper cases for extra decoration sometimes, but these actually worked really well and are brilliant for a simple little cake like this – plus the occasional exploding raspberry can be seen better 

Note the top right hand corner

Ingredients

125g unsalted butter

220g caster sugar

½ tsp vanilla extract*

200g low fat cream cheese

2 eggs

300g plain flour

1 tsp baking powder

5 tablespoons milk

4 tablespoons raspberry jam

10-12 raspberries (?) it’s up to you how many you put in really, this is just a guesstimate. 

*I frequently use a vanilla syrup which we got from a food fair and I have just managed to track down, so if you live in gloucestershire please do try this out

Preheat oven to 160 for a fan oven

Cream together butter, sugar and vanilla extract with electric hand whisk until light and fluffy, and then add the cream cheese and beat briefly (try not to over beat, which is quite easy to do with low fat cream cheese, or it’ll go too runny…then again, don’t panic too much if this happens) then add the eggs gradually, beating after each.

Sift flour and baking powder together in another bowl and add this and the milk alternately to the butter mix and beat until it’s all mixed in.

Fold in the jam and raspberries – ideally you don’t want them to break up completely so some cupcakes will have a nice little fruity surprise in them.

Spoon them into muffin cases (use an ice cream scoop for the normal sized ones – sounds odd but it works) and bake for around 30 minutes for the larger ones, 20 minutes for the smaller. 

The rather exciting silicone cases pre-baking

And post-baking...not my most uniformly baked effort

You could ice these with a cream cheese or vanilla icing, or dust them with icing sugar, but I like them pure and simple, so you can see the oozy bits of jam and raspberry. 

And some exciting news, my mother came home from work today having won this nifty little instant camera through some optician-y thing or other. So I may or may not be planning a sneaky commandeering of said camera posthaste. Hopefully more news on that later...