One of my favourite blogs is Rosie Alyea’s Sweetapolita. I was browsing her recipes and saw her licorice delights: Vanilla, Almond & Anise cupcakes. As the DB absolutely loves aniseed rings, I thought these might hit the spot nicely.
Usually B1 is the Cupcake Queen of the house. She experiments with all manner of (usually bright) colours and flavours and while she never uses a recipe, they always turn out great. Well, the few that I have been able to taste were great. Mostly there are crumbs left when I come home to find cup cakes have been made.
B1 was away for the weekend, so it was an even better time to launch myself into a cupcake experiment. There were no experts around to judge them – MasterChef style. Which is the way most food is judged at dinner time and the final result is a thumbs up, or down rating. An exceptionally good meal usually ends up with not enough thumbs and big toes getting involved.
The recipe can be found here, and those of us in Australia who have no idea what cake flour is; 1 cup cake flour is equal to 3/4 cup plain flour plus 2 tablespoons corn flour.
The vanilla and almond cupcakes were nice, I might experiment with almond meal next time instead of the almond extract. The icing was nice and I did add more anise extract then was in the recipe. My piping skills however are lacking. I think I might need to make some more cupcakes and practice the piping thing a bit more……. I wonder when B1 is away for the weekend next 😉
