Lady Grey Tea Cupcakes

My all-time favourite drink is Twinings Lady Grey tea. For anyone who's never heard of it, it's similar to Earl Grey tea but with lovely citrus flavours. Unfortunately it's not all that cheap, and I drink a LOT of tea, so Tesco's own brand often has to do. So when I was standing in a shop on Valentine's day with my boyfriend offering to buy me something as a present, I went for some Lady Grey teabags.

I've heard about the Earl Grey tea cupcakes sold at The Hummingbird bakery, but shock horror, I've never actually tried one. So I made my own :) I just used my basic no-mucking-about cupcake recipe, and added some tea. The tea has strong citrus flavours so I experimented with some orange zest in the icing to compliment it.

Lady Grey Tea Cupcakes

50ml boiling water

Lady Grey Tea Cupcakes

3 lady grey teabags
100g butter or margerine
175g caster sugar
2 eggs
1 tbsp baking powder
180g plain flour
50g natural yoghurt

for the buttercream icing:
2 tbsp milk
100g butter, softened and cut into small cubes.
300g icing sugar
zest of half an orange

for cupcake toppers -
small amount of royal icing
yellow and blue food colouring
icing sugar

• Add the teabags to the boiling water in a mug and leave to brew. It's best to do this half an hour before you start making your cakes so it has time to brew. Preheat the oven to 180 C/350 F.
• Cream together the butter and sugar in a mixing bowl, until light and fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time, and mix well after each one. 
• Sift the flour and baking powder together and fold in. 
• Stir in the yoghurt and the tea. Squeeze the teabags out fully into the mixture, but don't throw them away.
• Spoon the cake mix into a muffin tin lined with cupcake cases and bake for 15-20mins. Take them out when the top is springy to the touch.
• To make the icing, put the reserved teabags into a bowl with the 2 tbsp milk and leave to infuse.
• Sift the icing sugar into a bowl and cream together with the icing sugar. Add the milk and orange zest.
• When the cakes are out of the oven and completely cooled, carefully pipe the icing on in swirls, dust with icing sugar and top with a cupcake topper of your choice!

For the little teapot cupcake toppers, I simply drew a basic outline of a teapot onto baking paper and used it as a template to cut around. I combined a little water and icing sugar for the icing and piped some detail onto the cut out teapots. I used the plastic piping bags you can buy in a pack from supermarkets, and cut off the very tip so I could pipe very thin lines. This was all quite fiddly, but didn't actually take as long as you might think. I made 12 cupcakes toppers and iced them in around an hour. 

For a first experiment these turned out pretty tasty. I took them along to a meeting I had with friends the next day and they went down really well....despite the fact I'm hopeless at transporting cupcakes and they arrived like this:

But it's the taste that counts...right? 

It's been a lovely sunny day here in London, so I thought I'd share the view I had on my walk today.