Earl Grey Cupcakes

Ingredients:

• 1/2 cup unsalted butter
• 1 1/2 cups sugar
• 3 eggs
• 1 tsp vanilla essence
• 1 cup cake flour (or substitute)*
• 1 3/4 cups all purpose flour
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 3 earl grey teabags **
• 1 cup milk

Method: 

1. Preheat your oven to 170 °C and line your muffin tins with cupcake liners 
2. Cream the butter and sugar properly on a high speed until the cream becomes pale in colour. This may take a while, especially if your butter isn't room temperature to begin with. Waiting those few extra minutes is worth it, trust me.
3. Add the eggs one by one. 
4. Add the vanilla essence.
5. In a separate bowl, sift and combine all the dry ingredients.
6. On a lower speed, add the dry ingredients into the mixture - a few spoonfuls at a time. Stop mixing as soon as the streaks of dry ingredients disappear. Contrary to when creaming the butter and sugar (step 2), you must now be careful not to over-mix or else the cupcakes will turn out to be denser and heavier - not to mention that they won't look as pretty when halved due to tunneling.    
7. Pour the milk into the mixture using the same low speed. 
8. Fill up the cupcake liners.
9. Bake on a low heat for around 15 minutes until toothpick comes out dry and cupcakes are springy to the touch.
10. Place cupcakes on a cooling rack.
11. Prepare a cup of tea and enjoy!

Notes:

* I didn’t have cake flour; a simple substitute consists of 1 cup cake flour, and 2 tbsp corn flour. Mix, and then use the required amount (1 cup in this case).

** I chose to use Earl Gray for the subtle bergamot flavour and because it’s lighter than certain breakfast blends for instance - but any favourite type of tea can be used! Next time I plan to use Lady Grey tea which is slightly fruitier.

*** For perfectly shaped cupcakes, always place liners in a muffin tin before both filling and baking.

Remarks:

These cupcakes are simple to make and are not time consuming. They look pretty too! I love the speckled poppy-seed-like look and as a result chose not to frost them. Moreover, I believe that frosting would detract from their utterly distinct flavour!

Makes 22 cupcakes