Vanilla Fairy Cakes with Caramel

I am not a major fan of the cupcake trend. They are definitely cute, and sometimes very tasty, but too often they are just over iced, dry and a feeble excuse for cake.

Having said that, I do bake cupcakes regularly. My urge to bake is far greater than my urge to eat, so I'll often hand out bits of cakes to friends, family, and my (gradually expanding) flatmates. In the past, if I've baked a traditional cake, instead of just eating a slice, one flatmate (who was permanently on a diet) would just shave smaller and smaller pieces off it, until all that was left was a misshapen, dried out crust. By making individual cakes, most people take one, and greedy people take two. Everyone is happy, and there's no grief over who cut the cake in to such a weird shape that it is no longer slice-able.

Vanilla Cupcakes with a weird vintage effect...

So, in my efforts to vanquish the cupcake, stand up for British food, and yet remain with the sharing friendly pre-portioned sizes, I went for fairy cakes. (This was not at all to do with the sudden realisation that I'd forgotten to buy muffin cases.)

Even though it's not updated much, Cupcake Bakeshop is still one of the best sites I've found for cake recipes. The flavours are also much more adventurous than you'd normally find. On this occasion though, I went for the 3 Vanilla recipe. The main changes are as follows:

• 1 whole vanilla pod in the batter, as I bulk bought some and have a jar of 50 pods in my cupboard. I'm pretty free and easy with them.
• As my cakes were much smaller, I got 24 cakes out of this easily, and there is still some batter in the fridge, probably enough for another 5 or 6.
• I didn't have any cream cheese, so I just made a simple buttercream with icing sugar, vanilla essence (home-made with vodka and brandy... yum), butter and a splash of milk.
• Before icing the cakes, I cut out the centre, and filled it with the caramel left over from the biscuits I made at graduation. As it was packed with sugar, it was still fine to eat, but needed a little warming up to get it to a spoonable consistency.
• As they were fairy cakes, there wasn't much room for filling, so the caramel soaked in to the cake a bit, making it extra moist and yummy.
  
• I used home-made vanilla salt to garnish, which isn't as brown as the Malden version.

Vanilla Cupcakes with Caramel

These are pretty damn good, although I found them a little starchy. I think I probably overmixed the flour. I am not really a fan of the Dry-Wet method of cake mixing, but a lot of American cakes seem to use it. I also should have put a bit of vanilla salt on the caramel filling, and mixed some in with the icing, as the salt-kick wasn't as strong as I wanted. T declared them his favourite cake ever, and wants them for his birthday next month. I already have a cunning plan for then, but I should be able to incorporate these in to it...

P.S - I can't tell if I'm rubbish at iPhoto or if Blogger is doing strange things to my photos. Maybe both.