Prince William and the Duchess of Cambridge's baby was born yesterday, 22 July 2013, at around 4.24 pm. It was a baby boy, and it is a very exciting event for Britain and the Commonwealth.
Unfortunately, I was tucked up in bed when the baby arrived, but the night before, when I knew that Kate was in labour, I made some celebratory lemon baby cakes for the occasion. I made them yellow, being a gender-neutral colour, as I could not guess whether the Royal bub would be a boy or a girl.
I made my baby cakes in some cute London fairy cake papers I picked up in Daylesford, bedecked with red double decker buses and Royal Guard soldiers in bear skin hats:
There is even a soldier on the base of the cupcake paper:
The recipe that I used was for mini lemon meringue cupcakes from The Primrose Bakery Book (suitably from a London bakery), sans the meringue. Instead, I topped the cupcakes with vanilla buttercream tinted yellow. I only made a third of the recipe, as I didn't want to have to ice 36 cupcakes in the middle of the night.
These cupcakes are light and spongy, and rather more on the sweeter side than I would normally like. Next time, I would up the lemon factor by rubbing lemon zest into the sugar rather than just using a minimal amount of lemon juice, as the flavour was not very lemony.
To try out these cupcakes for yourself, you will need (for the full recipe, which makes 36 mini cupcakes):
110g softened butter
225g sugar
2 eggs
150g self-raising flour
125g plain flour
90ml milk
30ml lemon juice
1tbsp sour cream (I left this out)
Preheat your oven to 180 degrees Celsius. Beat the butter and the sugar together in a stand mixer until light amd creamy, then beat in the eggs.
In a small jug, mix together the milk, lemon juice and sour cream. Sift the flours together in a separate bowl.
Alternately add to the sugar/butter/egg mixture one third of the flours and one half of the milk mixture, combining well between each addition, and repeat until all of the flour and all of the milk has been added to the mixture, beginning and ending with the flours.
Spoon the batter into mini muffin tins lined with papers, ensuring that you do not fill the papers more than 2/3 full, and bake in the prepeheated oven for 15 minutes or until the cakes are cooked through and golden.
Immediately unmould the cakes from the tins (otherwise the papers will sweat off), and allow the cakes to cool on a wire rack. Once cooled, ice the cakes and decorate as desired. I used this buttercream recipe and piped it in ruffles on top of the cakes.
Congratulations to the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge on the birth of their son!
