I got the Love Bakery book, Cupcakes from the Heart, last month and I can hand on heart say it is one of my favourite cookbooks in my collection. So far I have made vanilla (sneakily I used Love's vanilla cupcake recipe via the Amazon reader for my Daring Bakers Challenge in August to make Brown Butter Baked Alaska cupcakes -they were divine I recommend trying the vanilla cupcakes using browned butter!), the pumpkin cupcakes and my favourite so far, the rhubarb and custard cupcakes.
The day my book arrived at work a colleague and I drooled over it for some time, deciding that the rhubarb cupcakes sounded lush. I was lucky enough to try one the very next day at Love Bakery and it lived up to the lushness!
A couple of weeks ago while Manny was at a festival I took a break from my baking with odd ingredients and decided to bake something delicious for a change - there was only one contender - rhubarb and custard.
The recipe suggests making a fresh rhubarb compote for the centre or using rhubarb jam. I checked our local Sainsburys for rhubarb but it looked beyond rotten and I couldn't face a bus or tube journey to Waitrose so I got some tinned rhubarb and made my own compote with that - it came out really nicely if I do say so myself.
I also got some lovely little rhubarb and custard sweets to decorate the cupcakes, but be warned, if you do this only do it when you are serving them as the colour runs out of the sweets over-night into the frosting!
These are definitely in my favourite cupcakes to bake list - nice moist cake, with a tangy filling and a lovely custard'y topping. How could you fail to love it!?
*Every time I think of Rhubarb and Custard this pops into my head, so the title is a tribute to one of my favourite kids tv shows, not a spelling error!
