ROSE AND STRAWBERRY CUPCAKES

I saw this product on the shelf in the supermarket a while ago and couldn’t resist it – Stork baking liquid.

According to the information on the pack you can use this liquid Stork in any recipe where you would use Stork or butter in your cakes and muffins.

I am quite happy to use margarine in baking.  In fact my mother never baked with butter – she considered it far too extravagant.  Cakes were made with margarine and pastry with lard, so I am used to the different flavour – I wouldn’t consider it inferior to butter, just different.

Nowadays, I bake with butter most of the time because I can afford to, but do use soft margarine in cakes when it’s appropriate, especially for a large batch for a cake sale when it saves a little time in the mixing.  But a liquid……..?

Anyway, the bottle had been lurking in the fridge for a while and I was just waiting for the right moment and the right recipe to try it.  Then Nick announced that they were having a charity cake sale at work so could I “rustle up some cakes”? – no problem !!

I decided to look on the Stork website and chose a recipe for strawberry cupcakes.  You can see the original recipe here.  Curiously, there is a tablespoon of jam in the ingredients but it’s not exactly clear from the recipe what you should do with it.  I assumed you should put it in the cake mixture with the other ingredients, so that’s what I did.

Adding the liquid to the bowl as I weighed out the ingredients was tricky – I soon realised that each small squirt weighed quite a lot so I was careful not to squirt too strongly and overdo it.

The cakes turned out beautifully and without a doubt, the liquid Stork made them incredibly easy to “rustle up”.  The mixture only stretched to eleven, though.

When it came to icing them, I decided to use butter icing.  On the Stork website there was a recipe for coffee cake where you make butter icing using the Stork liquid.  So I used that but adapted it by adding rosewater essence instead of coffee.

I had been trying to think how I could make something for Teatime Treats baking challenge, hosted by What Kate Baked and Lavender and Lovage.  This month the theme is for something floral hosted by Karen, so my rose and strawberry cupcakes should hopefully fit the bill.

The butter icing was very yellow in colour but the rose flavour came through just enough to realise it was there so I was pleased.

Here’s my adaptation of the recipe for rose and strawberry cupcakes using Stork liquid:

Ingredients

For the cakes:

140g self raising flour

½tsp baking powder

115g caster sugar

115g Stork baking liquid

2 eggs

1tblsp strawberry jam

55g fresh strawberries

For the icing:

225g icing sugar

55g Stork liquid

1-2 tblsp rosewater essence

extra strawberries or pink strawberry chocolate buttons for decorating.

Method

Preheat the oven to 180°C/160°fan/gas mk 4.  Put 11 (or 12) cupcake cases in a muffin tin.

Sift the flour and baking powder into a large mixing bowl.  Add all the other cake ingredients, except for the strawberries, and beat together until smooth. 

Wash, dry and hull the strawberries and chop each one into about 6 pieces.  Fold into the cake mixture.  Fill the cake cases as evenly as possible.

Bake for 20-25 minutes until golden and risen and firm to the touch.  Remove from the tin and leave to cool on a wire rack.

While the cakes are cooling you can make the butter icing.  Sift the icing sugar into a large bowl and weigh in the Stork liquid.  Add one tablespoon of rosewater essence and beat until smooth and fluffy.  If it seems a little too stiff, add more rosewater a little at a time.

Pipe swirls of icing on each cake and decorate with small whole strawberries or those cute little pink strawberry flavoured chocolate buttons that come in little packs for cake decorating.  You could of course let your imagination run riot and use flowers, glitter, hundreds and thousands or coloured sugar instead – the world is your oyster in cake decorations these days !!

Makes 11 cupcakes, or 12 if you’re very careful.