I feel slightly nostalgic of the fun that I’ve had with my little family over the school holidays, and we’re steadily settling back into our usual routines.

There are a still a few more days before little T starts his new school, so to make the most of our time together we decided to take a visit to Garson’s Farm in Esher, Surrey.

They are the largest ‘pick your own’ fruit and vegetables in the UK and they currently have an abundance of raspberries to pick.

I adore raspberries and they are in usually in season at the end of August and into September. I picked a kilo of raspberries at Garson’s earlier in August and there is a definite difference in taste picking them in early September. They are riper, fragrant, sweeter and utterly delicious.

I decided to bake a batch of regular vanilla cupcakes and I placed a fresh raspberry in the centre of the each cupcake before they went into the oven.

For the raspberry butter cream frosting I found that the juice from the raspberries is such a rich and vibrant pink colour – and all natural food colours too!

I used the following recipe for the raspberry frosting which I adapted from makinglifedelicous.com

Raspberry Butter cream Frosting

117g (1 stick) softened unsalted butter

340g of raspberries

½ teaspoon of lemon juice

300g of icing (powdered) sugar

 

Method

Place the raspberries in a small saucepan on the hob and cook on a medium heat until the raspberries break down into a juice.

Pour the raspberry juice through a fine mesh strainer to separate the seeds.  Place the juice back into the saucepan and simmer until it reduces to a ¼ cup (60ml) of concentrated juice that will now look more like a puree.

Cool the raspberry puree back to room temperature (I placed it in the fridge) whilst you make the butter cream.

Mix the butter in a standing mixer and gradually add the icing sugar, followed by the lemon juice.

Once the raspberry puree is cooled add this to the butter cream mix.

This frosting is not as stiff as my usual butter cream and I added additional icing sugar to stiffen it, you may wish to do the same.

Enjoy!

Tags: butter cream, Cupcakes, frosting, Raspberry cupcakes

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 5th, 2012 at 7:32 am and is filed under Baking Recipes, Cupcakes, Summer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.