Break out the bubbly

Bellini cupcakes
Cuspcake rating: 2.5 (3 if not for the filling!)

Started with Amy Sedaris' recipe for vanilla cupcakes, was wary of overfilling cups so filled them only about half, as a result, most of them didn't rise to the tops of the cups as I'd hoped. They are tasty, a little too sweet for me, and had a fine texture after baking. Unfortunately after keeping them overnight in the fridge, the texture seems to have changed quite alot and they are rather dense now. Will leave them to come fully to room temperature and report back.

To compensate for the cakes' sweetness, and to more quickly satisfy my curiosity about the recipes I study all week and wait till the weekend to try, I tried two combinations: The first, an attempt at the Bellini cupcake I spoke of. I had in mind a sourish roasted peach filling with a champagne whipped cream. The second is the Lavender cream filled cupcake with citrus cream cheese frosting, in the post after this.

It's such a tough juggling act – how do you make frostings that stand up to 30ºC+ weather, which aren't too sweet? It seems like all the nice light, less-sweet frostings need to be fridged, in which case, the cakes turn hard and cold. Hard cakes with nice frosting? Or nice cakes with toe-curlingly sweet frostings?

Scared off by the too-sweet honey buttercream of my mid-week attempt, I decided to err on the side of taste this time. Adapted the champagne curd recipe from cupcakeblog, and combined it with a filling of pureed roasted peaches, which I heated with a little brown sugar and lemon juice.

First, my caveat – I have never tasted a Bellini before. But from a cupcake point of view, my off-season white peaches were unfortunately rather tasteless, and I rather wish I could taste them more. Perhaps I should use tinned ones next time – sadly enough, tinned peaches are what most of us in this tropical country think of when you say "peach" anyhow. The curd however is quite yummy, despite not being a champagne drinker, (or liking alcohol at all) I find it enjoyable. The bite of the curd did successfully offset the sweetness of the cake, pity it also overtook my poor peach puree.

Well, at least this one seems to be an easy fix.