Have your Cake and Eat it

Cupcakes for Valentine's Day.

I used the recipe I devised for the International Picnic Day here

I put the mixture into heart shaped silicone cupcake cases.

The icing was made from some of the juice from the thawing raspberries mixed with icing sugar

Last Friday I went to a cookery demonstration at Fortnum and Masons in London.

They have a demonstration kitchen on the first floor and on the menu for Friday it was cupcakes.

When I arrived Harry from Petis Pois Cakes was grating the secret weapon while her

colleague removed the zest from a couple of oranges. These joined the other ingredients in the mixer to make a slackish orange yellow mixture.

While this batch was cooking some lemon icing was spooned over the 'one I made earlier' batch

and each cake topped with a marzipan pea. We then got down to the real work of tasting and demolished that batch. These cakes contained no butter or marg but due to the secret ingredient were moist and fluffy and tasted good. They were also gluten free. To find out more follow the link above or look out for Harry and Ashley's new recipe book 'Red Velvet and Chocolate Heartache'

Then we were offered samples from the range to see if we could identify the secret ingredients.............. I couldn't.

One of these was a red velvet cake made specially for Fortnums for Valentine's Day.

OK so the secret ingredient for the cakes is one of your 5 a day and for the ones demonstrated it was butternut squash, 200g mixed with 100g rice flour, 100g ground almonds, 2 eggs, zest of 2 oranges, some sugar, baking powder and 1/4 tsp salt. I don't know how much sugar was used but it was less than usual as the butternut squash contributes some of the sweetness.