The Great British Blogger

The whole principle of an introductory post is horribly embarassing to me, so I'm going to start off as briskly as possible and hope people just don't notice. I'm Indy. I'm English. I'm sixteen... until, like, tomorrow. I could just wait to post tomorrow and declare myself seventeen, but this way I get to look back on what I do now and if it's crap I can just say, 'ahh, yes, that was back when I was only sixteen... oh, those heady, carefree days!'

I will probably end up saying this a lot.

At the moment I'm swamped in the food I've been making for my birthday tomorrow so that should turn up quite a bit in the next few days/posts. The theme is a vintage-style tea party (British people do this all the time. Really, they do) so unfortunately I can't tell you how this first recipe actually tastes yet as we can't eat it till tomorrow. But I'm sure that when we do eat them, my friends will exclaim 'glorious!' and 'how charming!' through their moustaches, while presenting me with bouquets of roses and suchlike.

If you make them, you get to do this too.

As food blogs seem to have spread to every corner of the world but Britain, I've decided to start off by flying the flag for something I've scoured the internet for - a fail-safe cupcake recipe with metric measurements. None of your cups of sugar or sticks of butter for me, oh no!

The basic cupcake recipe used here is from the June edition of Good Food magazine (where I get practically all my recipes. This blog may just develop into an ode to Good Food magazine after a few weeks) and the filling is one of their suggestions. I didn't say I was going to start off being original.

I have renamed it though (for the reasons below), so I now present...

The Great British Cupcake.

Basic cupcake recipe:

Serves 12 (in a muffin tray)
Preparation: 10 minutes
Cooking time: 20 minutes

150ml pot natural yoghurt
3 eggs, beaten
1 tsp vanilla extract
175g caster sugar
140g self-raising flour
1 tsp baking powder
100g ground almonds
165g butter, melted

1. Line a 12 hole muffin tin with paper cases and heat oven to 190C. In a jug, mix the yoghurt, eggs and vanilla. Put the dry ingredients (and a pinch of salt) in a large bowl and make a well in the middle. I didn't really have enough to make a well in the middle, but whatever. Improvise.

2. Add the yoghurty mix and melted butter, and fold in with a metal spoon. Whack it into the cases (about three quarters full) and bake for about twenty minutes (I needed a couple of minutes more) until golden and springy. Cool for a few minutes, then lift them onto a wire rack and leave them to cool completely.

For the filling:
Same cupcake recipe.

Raspberry jam
550g tub of clotted cream (or really heavy double cream will do)
225g punnet of raspberries
Icing sugar

Once the cupcakes are cool, cut the tops off each one and set them aside. Spoon a dollop of jam over each one, then add a couple of raspberries and a generous teaspoon of cream. Put the tops back on, then sieve icing sugar over the top (I don't usually hold with this sieving nonsense, but in this case, go for it).

Marvel at the fresh, English raspberries!
Ooh and ahh at the Cornish clotted cream!
Be impressed at how utterly fail-safe this recipe truly is!

...You want proof about how utterly fail-safe it is?

I wasn't going to publicise this, but when I was making it, I stirred up all the ingredients, put them into cupcake cases, popped them into the oven, licked my spatula with a triumphant flourish... considered how foul the mixture tasted... and realised I'd forgotten to add the sugar.
So I had to whip them out of the oven again, scrape the semi-baked mixture out of their cases and back into my bowl, add sugar, stir like the devil had posessed me, blob them back into cases and bung them in the oven again.

And still, they worked!

See, even if I fail at cooking, this recipe doesn't. Great and British all over the place.

The same cannot be said for me.