Leesa was telling me the other day about how much she loves her Women’s Weekly Cupcake cookbook. It was only when I was looking through my bookshelf this afternoon that I realised I have the same one so it was time to do some baking!

Cloud Cakes

I chose to make cloud cakes which are strawberry (I used raspberry) and vanilla cupcakes with a meringue type icing. The recipe is so much better than the Magnolia cupcake recipe I used last time. The Magnolia recipe had heaps of butter and sugar in it – a heart attack waiting to happen. These had much less butter and less sugar and were really light and fluffy. You can find the recipe here.

Leesa will probably say I cooked them too long because they are too brown on top but I’m still trying to figure out the temperature on my stupid oven. They tasted great anyway, if I do say so myself

I made Magnolia’s vanilla cupcakes once before, in Australia, but this was my first time making them here in my French kitchen with my very hot French oven. Even though it’s a cupcake recipe, I made just one big cake as I didn’t have any cupcake liners. Must buy some of those for next time. You can find the Magnolia recipe here with the translated version below

Vanilla Cupcakes

190g self raising flour
150g plain flour
225g softened butter
400g sugar (used less than that as it seemed like a lot)
4 large eggs (room temperature)
240ml milk
1 vanilla bean pod

Vanilla Buttercream Icing

225g softened butter
700g icing sugar (can use less)
120ml milk
2 teaspoons vanilla extract

You can read the recipe here.

That makes way too much icing for icing a regular cake so half that recipe should be more than enough. I only made half that and still had heaps of icing left over.

I must admit I completely stuffed up the cake recipe because I miscalculated the conversion for the sugar so only put 150g in the cake. Surprisingly it tasted just fine which just goes to show you don’t need that much sugar for something to be sweet. The super sweet icing made up for it anyway. I also stuffed up the flour as I only used self raising flour, not of mixture of self raising and plain flour. I should really pay attention to what I’m doing in future. But again, it didn’t really matter as the cake turned out really well.

And yes, I will be doing two workouts tomorrow to make up for all this butter and sugar.