student sunshine cupcakes.

so the title of this post refers to my latest venture into the world of baking. my lovely housemate anna gave me a book of cupcake recipes for my birthday, which has some recipes and combinations i haven't seen before. one of these was the 'hot and spicy' cupcakes. a quick scan of the ingredients revealed chili, mango and vodka as the primary ingredients. i was immediately intrigued and thought straight away of april, who i thought would also love this combination! as she was returning this weekend and had been away for her 21st birthday i decided to whip up a batch for her return.

the recipe is really easy to follow. it's essentially just a normal cake mixture with one finely chopped chili and 125g of chopped dried mango thrown in. the recipe does call for placing half a chili (sliced length ways) across the top of each cupcake but i thought this might be a bit too much! so i left them out, but next time would but a bit more chili in the mixture to give it a little more heat.

chopping up the chili and mango

stir the mango into the mixture by hand

the mixture was also slightly dense so next time i think i would add a splash of boiling water to break it down a little bit.

so i decided to rename these cupcakes 'student and sunshine' for a few reasons. the mango, chili and lime combination are such great summer flavours which are perfect for when the weather is as glorious as it is at the moment (naturally as it's revision season...). the student part comes from the cakes' topping - vodka!

under-rated cake ingredients!

you first make a vodka syrup by dissolving sugar in water (i think it was 50g of sugar and two tablespoons of water). you bring the mixture gently to the boil for a few minutes before adding four tablespoons of vodka (please be careful at this point as it does splutter a bit, and boiling sugar is hot!). you use a skewer to pierce the cakes and pour this syrup over the top so it soaks into the sponge.

making the syrup

glistening with the vodka!

the final touch is to mix icing sugar and vodka for the drizzle. this is where the student in me took over... the icing was too thick and i was aware there wasn't much vodka left in the bottle so i poured the entire remainder in. turns out there was more than i thought! so these cupcakes had quite a serious kick! although thankfully as the icing set this diminished slightly! so this explains the student aspect. a grating of lime finishes these cakes off nicely.

once you get over the initial hit of the vodka these are really good cakes, the dried mango becomes slightly more moist from being in the mixture and adds a lovely sweet, chewy dimension to the kick. combined with the subtle chili and the heat of the vodka this really is great for a summer afternoon. which is precisely what we did when we moved our little table to the garden and had a mini tea party. complete with the absolutely delicious brownies that april baked. this really was the perfect revision break!

living the revision high life

i would now like to take this opportunity to save a massive thank you to emma white and the girls at her campus exeter for their recommendation of my blog! it means a lot so thank you! and please check out the list of other exeter student blogs as there is such an amazing quality and diversity out there. http://www.hercampus.com/school/exeter/best-exeter-student-blogs

for now i hope you enjoy the sunshine, i'll be returning to my revision grotto!

love,
nen
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