Malteser Cupcakes

My Mr's boss is going on holiday, and her last day is tomorrow. Being the nice guy that he is, he asked me to make her some cupcakes as a farewell present. Gives me something to do while I'm on leave from work and feeling the grip of boredom!

His boss requested something Malteser related. Who doesn't love Maltesers?!

I tried putting Maltesers in the cupcakes themselves before baking first. This wasn't too successful, and to be honest I didn't think it would be. Instead I opted to use a well tested chocolate cupcake recipe and a vanilla malt butter cream frosting.

The butter cream is easy to put together and super malty. This is easily rectified by changing the amount of malt to taste. I recommend you add it one tablespoon at a time and make sure you do lots of taste testing!!

All ready to go to work with hubby tomorrow. Hope the boss likes them!

 Malteser Cupcakes
The Chocolate Cupcakes - from this post (obviously minus the oreos!)

The Frosting: Vanilla Malt Buttercream
Ingredients
250g butter, softened
2.5 cups icing sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
3 tablespoons malt powder, or alter to taste (I use Nestle)

Method
- Cream butter and sugar together using a hand held mixer/stand mixer fitted with whisk attachment. Start on low until the icing sugar is incorporated and then mix on high for 3 minutes. Will be very fluffy.
- Add vanilla and malt and beat again for another minute.

Top cupcakes with a Malteser and enjoy!

28 today..

Taking a break from the tail end of my 12 days off to blog, cos it's been so long - I'm clearly not good at doing this regularly!
As the title suggests, it's my birthday today. I've always hated having my birthday 10 days after Christmas, and as a child I'd have birthday parties that would be VERY small due to the other kids being on holidays. These days I work around people where possible, but as I'm content with small celebrations, it's no big deal.
Today I started the day with lots of pressies from Mr Monkei, including a new camera which will hopefully make my product shots a LOT better (no pressure camera) and a heap of gorgeous scented stuff from The Body Shop - this is luxury in my world!

After a thunderstorm this morning, the sun came out and we headed off.

We started off at Mum's for more pressies including some Wilton icing tips I wanted -I'm keen to master cookies this year and will definitely post the results.

Afterwards we went out for a lunch at a cafe we hadn't tried yet in Warrandyte.


The home made wedges were beautiful!

We then wandered around Montsalvat in Eltham, which Mr hadn't seen before. So many pretty things to photograph - heaven for someone playing around with a shiny new camera. I hadn't realised how outdated my camera was, it's 6 years old now and really showing its age. We hadn't realised till we got the photos printed from last week's trip interstate.


Beautiful place!

I'm now sipping on a glass of wine that we picked up on the trip, and looking forward to dinner out. I've definitely been spoilt!

Will be back very soon to the (not quite) regularly scheduled blogging of pretty things and cookery...

How have you all spent your break?