Sticky Maple Cupcakes

This recipe isn’t as impressive as the jelly slice one I posted recently, but hey, these are definitely a different taste to a regular cupcake!

A bit of background: I LOVE STICKY DATE PUDDING. When I was 11, I did some catering work with my Mum up in the Barossa, and we were serving a lunch and dessert combo at a wine event. It was.. some mignon thing, and the greatest sticky date pudding I’ve ever had in my life. Since then, I’ve been unable to find one the same. It was just magnificent. Maybe one day I’ll be able to recreate that delicious flavour… *sighs*

But we’re talking cupcakes here not puddings! But.. The reason these are sticky maple and not sticky date is that… uhh.. I didn’t really feel like using dates. I found this recipe that included real maple syrup and wanted to give it a go, as I thought it would be a really interesting flavour.

Ingredients:

• 50g Butter
• 100g Brown Sugar
• 3 Eggs
• 2 tbsp Maple Syrup (if you can, try to use real maple syrup)
• 150g Self-Raising Flour

Method:

1. Preheat your oven to 160C and line your cupcake tin with 12 cases.
2. Cream butter and sugar, add maple syrup.
3. Add 2 lightly beaten eggs until just combined (don’t overmix)
4. Add in the flour a little bit at a time. If the mix is too thick, add the third egg and mix through.
5. Spoon into the cases and bake for 15-20 minutes. Use a skewer or piece of spaghetti to see if it’s ready, as if you press the top it will feel like it’s not done. If the skewer comes out clean, take them out!
6. Put somewhere to cool and enjoy.

Now as you can see from the picture I didn’t decorate it (I actually ran out of energy this day, we made three different lots and it was hot), but here’s the recipe I would have used. Note that this IS a syrup like the sticky date puddings have, so if you want this to be easy to eat at a party/something, you might want to do it in a smaller quantity and drizzle over the top lightly.

Syrup Ingredients

• 3/4 cup Brown Sugar (sorry about the change in measurements, I know the actual recipe is in grams!)
• 2 tbsp melted butter
• 1/4 cup boiling water

Syrup Method:

1. Combine all ingredients until melted/mixed and microwave for a minute or so. It should be a slightly thin liquid mixture. If you let it sit for a little while it should turn into a thick syrup, but don’t let it cool down too much.
2. Poke a few holes with skewers in the top of each cupcake and use a teaspoon to drizzle the mix down into the cupcake. Each cupcake should have about 3 teaspoons worth.

Finally, to decorate, whip up some cream and pipe a small swirl on the top, and drizzle a little bit of cooled syrup over the cream. You can skip the above step and just do this one if you don’t want the potential mess. Ready to serve, yum!