Honey cupcakes with honey & cinnamon buttercream

I found a recipe for honey cupcakes on Oprah's website. I wouldn't have thought to look there for recipes but this one came up in a search and she got it from a White House pastry chef, so I thought it was worth a try. Which is somewhat ironic because I don't like honey by itself, but it's OK in tea, so I thought I'd give it a go in cake.

I got out my scales again to continue my cupcake weight experiment (OCD?). I made a few 25 gram mini cupcakes and they came out just the right size. Full, but not rising over the top :)

I also made 12 muffin-size cakes and tried them with slightly different weights - a row of 55g (far left), row of 60g, row of 65g and row of 70 grams (far right). As you can see none of them rose over the top, which was my main objective. The 55g cakes looks a little scant, but if you're going to be piping icing on top of them anyway I don't think it really matters - you'd still be getting quite a mouthful of cake if you got one of those!

Oprah's chef proposed a simple frosting of icing sugar, honey and lemon juice, which probably would have been fine. But I wanted something that I could pipe! So I decided to try a honey cinnamon buttercream which I found on Loves To Eat (...I remember the days when I could still afford bananas for baking...*sigh*). I'm a die-hard cinnamon fan so it seemed like a decent idea.

A word of advice: taste your icing before you pipe it all over your cakes. If I'd done this I think I would've added some more cinnamon... it just seems to be lacking something. Which makes me think that Oprah's version with the lemon juice might have been just right - a bit of a citrus kick. Next time.

I probably did too many of my beloved rosette swirls, but they're just so pretty. Also I was lazy and only used one tip - the smaller 22 star. As expected it looked a little small on the larger cakes.

I got a bit carried away with some of them, but I quite like how this one came out.

Overall I wasn't hugely impressed by the honey cake, but like I said, I'm not really a honey fan to begin with. They're not bad.

The cupcake army advances.