I found it!

I've been gone for a long time. Sorry about that. I truly didn't mean to start writing then stop, and I don't plan on letting that happen again. I moved country and then I moved city - so some big changes have been happening! I'm now living in Wellington, New Zealand and am busy setting up home here. So far, so good. Thankfully Wellington has a great food culture built up by some truly dedicated foodies so there's a lot of inspiration around. Plus it means I can find ingredients that are usually hard to source in this part of the world. Bonus!

My first post back is a bit of a cheats post - it's a recipe that I mentioned in my Lemon Cake post. This however is not a Lemon Cake recipe - it's the lost Nigella Lawson recipe for Raspberry Cupcakes! Hurrah! I am so happy I found this because it was really good. And where did I find it you ask? Well, clever me had printed the recipe the first time I found it (I thought I had made the recipe straight from my laptop but turns out I didn't) and had stashed it safely inside an old copy of Donna Hay's magazine that I had lying around (but not the one with the Lemon Cake recipe in it). Anyway, that was confusing, and superfluous to your requirements - all you need is this recipe. I love it and totally recommend it. Raspberries in a beautifully soft, light, brown sugary cake. Make some. Eat them. Rejoice in sweet cakey goodness. Seriously.

Raspberry Cupcakes

Thank you to Nigella Lawson for this recipe - which was once featured on her website (where I found it) but has now for some inexplicable reason been removed.

1 cup unsalted butter
1 cup packed light brown sugar
2 large eggs
½ cup milk
2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
½ teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 ½ cups plain flour
2 cups fresh or frozen raspberries

Preheat the oven to 180°C and lightly grease a muffin/cupcake pan - if you want to use paper cases they work fine as well and there's no need to grease the pan. Gently melt the butter and when just melted whisk in the brown sugar. Let this mix cool to room temperature (just a few mins) then whisk in the eggs. Add the milk, vanilla, salt and baking powder; whisk all to combine. Add the flour and whisk again until just combined. Fold in the raspberries. (A tip I have heard, and that I follow but haven't actually tested, is to toss the berries lightly in flour before adding them - this stops them sinking to the bottom of the batter). Spoon the batter into the prepared muffin pans and bake until a skewer inserted into the middle of a cupcake comes out clean - which is about 20mins for smaller cakes or 25 for larger ones. At this point they will look all bouncy, light brown and beautiful.

Leave the muffins in the pans for 5mins after removing them from the oven then transfer to a cooling rack. Ice or frost when completely cold - otherwise the icing will melt and drool off the sides.

Nigella's recipe suggests icing with White Chocolate Ganache but I think they were even better with Passionfruit Cream Cheese Icing - basically just whip together a pot of cream cheese and icing sugar to taste and then add passionfruit pulp (or the syrup you can buy in a little can from the supermarket).

I made these on a Thursday night and then iced them and took them to work the next day and they tasted great. They won't stay around long enough to see if they keep for more than a day. They'll be munched down and demolished. As they should be.

P.S. I'm writing this while waiting for Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies to bake. The recipe is from the lovely and hugely inspirational Molly Wizenberg's blog Orangette and oh my gosh do they smell good. Really really good. If you don't wish you were here right now - you should. I have a glass of milk ready and waiting.