Gluten Free vanilla cupakes

As my mother, my sister and my niece are all coeliac, I am aware that finding really nice, gluten free baked goods is very difficult. Everything seems to go rock hard and stale so quickly.

While I can't promise you that these cupcakes will have as long a shelf life as cupcakes made with wheat flour would, I can promise you that these are just as tasty and you will really find it almost impossible to tell the difference.

What is more, I am about to give away my secret to making the worlds nicest vanilla buttercream ever (frosting if you are reading from across the Atlantic).

So here is everything you need to know:

Ingredients

Cupcake batter

120g of self raising gluten free flour

120g of caster sugar

120g of melted butter

2 large eggs

1 teaspoon of vanilla extract

Vanilla buttercream or frosting

100g of softened butter

225g of icing sugar

1 teaspoon of vanilla extract

1 or 2 tablespoons of warm water.

Method

Cupcake batter

1. Firstly line your cupcake tray with 12 cupcake cases. You can use any type you like but I like the Dr Oetkar ones. They are a good size and good quality.

2. Place your sugar, GF flour, vanilla extract and 2 eggs in your mixing bowl.

3. Melt your butter in the microwave or a saucepan until just melted. You do not want your butter to get too hot. Wait a few minutes until it cools. If you add your butter to the mixture too quickly, the butter will cook the eggs and you will end up with tiny lumps of scrambled egg in your cupcakes. You really don't want that.

4. Now add your cooled butter to your other ingredients and beat them all together until smooth and creamy. This will take around three minutes. This batter is often quite a liquid batter. That is completely normal.

TIP . Stop beating your ingredients every minute or so and use a spatula to scrape down the sides of the bowl so that you don't end up with lumps in your batter.

5. Now spoon your batter into the individual cupcake cases that you prepared earlier. it is very hard to measure this and ensure that you are spreading your batter evenly but I recommend a large, generous table spoon into each case and that should do it.

6. Preheat your oven to 180 degrees whether it is a fan oven or not. If it is a fan oven the cupcakes should take around 13 minutes to bake and if it is not a fan over they will take around 15 minutes.

They should be a lovely golden brown but if they are a little pale, leave them in the oven and check them every 60 seconds so that they don't over bake. Gluten free cupcakes do tend to be slightly darker than non gluten free cupcakes and they also rise less. That is perfectly normal.

TIP: A lot of ovens cook unevenly. Mine is one of them. At around 11 minutes I tend to open my oven and turn the tray 180 degrees so it is facing the opposite way. Do not open sooner than 11 minutes or your cupcakes may sink.

Icing

I have been asked for this recipe countless times and it really is so simple to do. All it takes is a little bit of patience.

Combine all your ingredients together in your mixing bowl and beat on high for around 10 minutes (yes 10 minutes!)until your mixture is almost white in colour. Less experienced bakers tend to stop beating too soon and your really don't get the same lightness of texture if you do that.

Add your water sparingly. A lot of recipes for buttercream will advise milk or cream to slacken your mixture but milk and cream go off so they shorten the lifespan of your buttercream considerably and they bring very little to the table in terms of flavour in my opinion. Warm water is a much better option.

If you find that you have been a little heavy handed with your water and your buttercream has gone too slack, just pop it into the fridge for half an hour (or longer if needed), take it out and beat it and again and it should be perfect.

Now I have disposable piping bags which are perfect for icing your cupcakes but really that is all just for appearances. You can take a tablespoon and scoop a dollop of mixture on to your cupcakes and they will taste just as nice. If, like me though, you have the tools then piped buttercream really does look nice so go for it.

The nozzle I use is the Ateco brand and the no is 844. It has a sort of star tip on it but any nozzle with a star tip will do.

Cut the tip from at the top of your bag and place your nozzle inside your piping bag.

Fill your bag with your buttercream.

Now squeeze and twist your bag in a circular motion at the same time to pipe the buttercream onto your cupcake. I will post a video of this at a future date.