Chamomile Cupcakes with Sneaky Peppermint

I'm not very creative with my baking choices at the moment. I first made chamomile cupcakes last year (original post here) and just recently I kept thinking I should make them again.

Of course, if you're going to bake cupcakes you need someone to eat them, and I finally saw my opportunity on Saturday when we invited friends over for dinner.

Just before the teabag massacre...

I bought a box of chamomile tea, but it wasn't until I had already starting putting ingredients together that I read the label more carefully to see that it was called "Relax Chamomile" and it was actually a mixture of chamomile (>50%) and peppermint!

Thankfully peppermint is delicious, and these turned out fine. The little pepperminty aftertaste was actually kind of refreshing.

They look a bit grainier with the "Relax" tea mix, but they were still nice and light. I'll have to try some other herbal teas and see how they come out. :)

Chamomile Cupcakes with Honey Icing

I felt a bit mischievous cutting open and emptying teabags.

But it had to be done. This recipe for Honey Chamomile Cupcakes is another of Joy the Baker's masterpieces, and I was intrigued when I first saw it on her blog (<--here, includes full recipe). I finally got around to giving it a go today.

Just the word chamomile makes me feel more relaxed. The fragrance is even better. (Though, oddly, it's not my favourite tea to drink.) The recipe calls for 3 tablespoons of dried chamomile, which I now know is approximately equivalent to the contents of 6 teabags.

The honey icing is glossy and luxurious looking. As it should be considering the cream content.

And there you have it. Delightfully delicate cupcakes (actually mini cupcakes in this case - seemed appropriate for my first batch of "testers").


These are off to work with me tomorrow, but I've already had my only little taste taste, and I'm quite certain I will be making them again in the future... even if I have to eat them all myself. Lucky I got the large box of chamomile :)

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.