Last week I had some spare mascarpone left over from making a delicious gnocchi bake. Craving something sweet, I decided to have a go at making some tiramisu flavoured cupcakes with the mascarpone as a topping. Tiramisu is one of my all time favourite desserts, so I thought I’d see if I could recreate the flavour.
I don’t often make cupcakes but I invested in some silicon cases especially for these, and did a bit of research. There are loads of gluten free cupcake recipes. They tend to involve sugar, butter, SR flour, xanthan gum and eggs in various quantities (there was a surprising amount of variation) but on browsing specifically for coffee cupcake recipes, I came across a tip I had to test out. This came from the Gluten Free Alchemist, and it was to add some yoghurt to keep the cakes moist.
I couldn’t follow her recipe as it was for coffee and walnut and included ground nuts, which I didn’t want to use in mine – so I borrowed the tip and created my own recipe using an amalgamation of what I’d seen on various sites. I’m not normally one for inventing baking recipes but this was a fairly low risk situation.
There are two more important tips I learned which came in handy for this bake:
1) Let your gluten free cake batter rest for 20 mins before baking it. Gluten free flours take more time to absorb moisture than regular flour, so resting helps soften the grains and improves the texture.
2) If you’re using silicon cases, like I was for the first time, take the buns out before they cool, so they don’t go soggy from trapped moisture.
So on to the recipe:
To make 12 coffee flavour cupcakes, I used these ingredients:
- 115g salted butter, room temperature, cubed
- 30g caster sugar
- 85g dark brown soft sugar
- 2 large eggs, beaten
- 115g gluten free self raising flour
- 1 tsp baking powder
- 1/4 tsp xanthan gum
- 4 tsp espresso coffee powder
- 3tbsp yoghurt
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
First, mix together the coffee, yoghurt and vanilla in a small bowl, and leave it to sit.
Cream together the butter and sugar in a medium sized mixing bowl using a whisk.
Add half the beaten eggs and sieve in half of the flour then continue to mix carefully with the whisk. Then add the remaining egg and sieved flour along with the baking powder and xanthan gum.
Finally, mix in the yoghurt with the coffee and vanilla.
Rest the mix for 20 minutes, during which time you can put the oven on and warm up a flat metal tray if using silicon cases. (I baked these at 155C to account for the silicon cases acting as an insulator).
Spoon the batter into the twelve cup cake cases and pop them on the heated tray. Bake for 25 minutes. I turned mine round after 18 mins but as you can see they still have a slightly uneven rise, so next time I’d probably turn them a little sooner (not too soon to avoid collapse).
After five minutes, remove from the silicon cases onto a cooling rack.
If you’re using paper cases, bake at 170C for 15-20 mins
What you can’t see from the screen capture below is how springy the cakes were. I can’t add a video here so here’s a link to my Instagram reel – it’s really worth a look. They were brilliant!
Once cooled, I pricked the cup cakes with a skewer and drizzled in a mixture of Kahlua, espresso and icing sugar. Then I piped on a mix of my leftover mascarpone and double cream. Another top tip if you happen to be mixing these – if you’ve got more double cream than mascarpone, you can whip them both together in a bowl. If you have more mascarpone, you should just loosen it with a spoon then fold it in carefully to your whipped double cream, to avoid it splitting.
For a finishing touch, I sieved a bit of drinking chocolate powder on the top. Ta da! They were delicious.
