It’s my 100th post! Bring on the celebratory streamers, party poppers and lashings of ginger beer.

Or my Altered Cupcake ‘Recipe’

How to alter a vanilla cupcake recipe to make different cupcakes.

The first thing you need to do is find an awesome vanilla cupcake recipe. I thoroughly recommend this one from Glorious Treats – there are amazing recipes over there to check out! Then you need to decide what kind of cupcakes you want to make. I decided to split a recipe in half, and make half Chai and vanilla and half orange with chocolate icing. I don’t recommend this, unless you’ve got a way to accurately split mixed items – it’s much easier to make a full batch and not wonder about what you’ve done when . . .

Chai and Vanilla Cupcakes

Before I started cooking, I heated up the buttermilk (using a little more than in the recipe). This is a bit of a smelly task, so be prepared! In a normal coffee mug, I put a couple of chai tea bags and poured the warm milk over it. I left this while I prepared the other ingredients.

Just before I started adding the dry mixture and the buttermilk, I took the T-bags out and stirred the chai flavoured buttermilk. I think the best thing to do here would be to heat up and prepare more than you need, then measure out the right amount of milk for the recipe.

I used the new cream cheese frosting you can buy at the shops now, and topped it with cinnamon sugar and sliced, crystalised ginger. My husband suggested that I use less ginger next time, as it was a bit over powering.

Orange Cupcakes with Chocolate Frosting

This was so easy to alter! Instead of adding vanilla, I added orange flavour, two drops of yellow colouring and a drop of red. I probably could increase the colouring and the flavour a bit.  I iced this with chocolate cream cheese frosting pipped through a bag – next time I think I’d run it through the food processor a bit to make it fluffier – then decorated with those icing tubes and a jaffa (the outing comes off the jaffa in the fridge though).

You could probably have even more fun with this recipe by adding mini choc-chips through the batter, or swirl some melted chocolate or chocolate cake batter through the orange batter – mmm, new ideas to try.

The final thing to think about is this – once you’ve got a good base recipe, there’s an awful lot you can do to alter it. There’s all sorts of flavours available to experiment with – I got inspiration from the chocolate and lolly aisle! Just make sure you share your yummy cupcake alterations!