Red Velvet Butterfly Cakes with Raspberry Curd

Post Coital #GBBO Fix!

So, the Great British Bake Off has finished for another year and as ever I am inspired by the baking of this year's contestants.  I was rooting for Ruby, but I think the best girl won on the day.  I mentioned that I had plans for some raspberry curd on my last Sunday Afternoon Tease post, and here are the resulting cupcakes.  Ladies and gentlemen, I give you my Red Velvet Butterfly Cupcakes with Raspberry Curd!

For the chocolate cupcakes, I used Nigella's recipe for Red Velvet Cupcakes from her website and the only change I made was to use a natural food colouring instead of my usual radioactive food colouring paste.  You may remember the 'vibrant' rainbow cake that I made for my little girls' birthday earlier in the year that featured a hippy trippy amount of food colouring?  Well, I decided to be a little more restrained and used this natural food colouring, which I still think gave a nice result; as you can see the cake batter is a bit on the puce side due to the addition of cocoa powder.

Not so much a butterfly, as a vampire bat, methinks?!   I scooped a circle out of the centre of the cupcakes and filled them with some gloriously zingy raspberry curd.  You can find a recipe for raspberry curd here on the Waitrose website, although I think I actually hashed together a couple of recipes for this batch.  

Even though I say so myself, these cupcakes are delicious; the raspberry curd and fresh raspberry lifts the cupcakes to another level.

I shall be following the progress of young Ruby on her blog, which you can find here.

Happy Baking!  Galx