Saffron & Rose Cupcakes

When I was 16 years old my sister and her boyfrfiend took me for dinner at a restaurant called Zorba The Buddha. I was utterly thrilled with this outing as it was in the city, to be specific, it was in Darlinghurst which was in my opinion, edgey, and it was on a school night! Zorba The Buddha was in fact run by Orange People. Or to be precise, the followers of the Bagwan Rajneesh who was at the time embroiled in some kind of sex scandal.

His followers dressed in robes dyed the same saffron colour as that of the Hari Krishnas and ran the restaurant presumably to raise money for their cult. Whatever the Bagwan was up to, it had no effect on the food served at the restaurant, or the jazz music played by the saffron clad staff. I can still hear the strains of the trumpet today.

But recently when I watched a documentary about the origins of saffron, it wasn't the Bagwan and his cult that immediately came to mind. It was whether or not saffron could be incorporated into a cupcake. Saffron is actually the thin thread centre of a purple crocus-like flower. It's grown in thE deserts of Morocco and is hand picked, dried in the sun, then shipped to the markets where it fetches an enormous price. I wondered whether it would make sense to put such an expensive spice into cupcakes. But since the saffron I have was just sitting in the cupcoard, I thought why not!? See what you think!

Ingredients
125g butter
1 cup caster sugar
3 eggs
2/3 cup buttermilk
1.5 cups self raising flour
a big pinch of genuine saffron threads
the seeds of one vanilla pod

1. Preheat the oven to 180 degrees celcius. Line a muffin tin with cup cake papers - you'll get between 12 - 16 cupcakes out of this mix.
2. Place all ingredients in the bowl of your Kitchenaid and mix on first gear to combine. Scrape down the sides of the bowl to incorporate any unmixed ingredients. Increase speed to sixth gear and beat for three minutes.
3. Drop spoonfuls of mix into each cupcake paper. I use a size 6 icrecream scoop to get each cake the exact same size.
4. Bake for 20 minutes or until cakes are golden brown and spring back when touched.
5. Cool on a wire rack.

Icing
500g pur icing sugar
75g softened butter
1 tsp rose water essence
6 drops pink food colouring
3 tblsp milk
3 tblsp water

1. Combine all ingredients in the bowl of your Kitchenaid, then increase speed to sixth gear. Beat until all ingredients are well combined.
2. Pipe icing onto cold cakes and decorate with a sugar flour.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Marshmallow Sherbet Cones

Image
I have always been a big fan of sherbet in the many forms it comes in. As a kid, I loved those sherbet cones you bought from the corner store – semi solidified sherbet in a stale cone, with chewy marshmallow on the top, coated in hundreds and thousands. I also loved Wiz Fizz – fruity sherbet in a glassine bag with a little plastic shovel. I’d most often buy these on the way home from the pool, because they were only five cents. Unfortunately, my hands were usually still wet from the pool, turning the bag to a sloppy mess before I could eat its entire contents. For my 10th birthday my mum decided to include homemade sherbet cones on the menu. Thanks to The Australian Women’s Weekly recipe cards, we had the recipe for sherbet and marshmallow, albeit, on different cards. My clever mum bought flat bottomed square cones, half filled them with sherbet and then topped them with pink or green marshmallow. Of course each had a liberal sprinkling of hundreds and thousands. In my explo
Read more

White Chocolate Ganache

Image
I don’t think there is an occasion more joyous than a wedding. Of course, once a wedding has taken place, many more joys follow, like the arrival of a long awaited baby. But it all starts with a wedding, and I find weddings to be chock-filled with hope. If you’re lucky, you only ever need to have one wedding – although some people have more than one, if not several! So the trick to getting your fill of wedding joy is to know lots of people who are planning on getting married. As a cake baker, I am getting to participate in weddings, baby showers, naming days and even funerals (although not too many of those, thank goodness)! I consider it a privilege to be invited to create cakes and cupcakes for these landmark occasions in people’s lives. We (my darling husband and I) always try extra hard to come up with something special that fits the occasion and the people who we’re baking for. And what we’ve discovered is trying extra hard allows us an opportunity for continuous improvement. When
Read more

Road Test: Sunbeam Mixmaster v Kenwood Patissier

Image
Back in 2003 when I began my most recent baking odyssey, I acquired a Sunbeam Mixmaster – the remake of the classic retro mixer from the fifties. My mother had a Mixmaster which she bought in the seventies, and which I did most of my cake baking with as a teenager (when the obsession truly took hold). She still has that Mixmaster today, although it is significantly worse for wear – the plastic cover over the light is broken and they haven’t made the bulbs for years, so there’s a “live” cavity where the light bulb should be. I can vouch for that because I stuck my finger in there accidentally last year and got a nice shock from it. I paid quite a lot of money for my Mixmaster and it held pride of place on my kitchen bench for three years. That is until I had it running one Sunday and one of the motors blew up! I discovered that the twin motor “600 watt” power it claimed worked in two ways: 1. to run the beaters; 2. to turn the turntable the bowl sits on. After seeing flames shooting fro
Read more