Some of you may recognise the above as a quote from the latest Star Trek movie, out of context it sounds only marginally sillier than in; when stated in a burly voiced way by my husband it means only one thing, he is about to devour another cream cheese frosted cupcake.
The story behind this characteristic outburst of silliness, as always, involves food. We had been invited over to Sunday lunch at friends’ in Cambridge and as usual alot of tasty homemade goodies were to be had, including very attractive, moreish cupcakes.
My friend emailed me the recipe and I made a batch on Monday. The recipe was from the Telegraph, and I found that really one should make 1/2 the quantity of cream cheese frosting – because you really do wonder about yourself when you are standing in a kitchen at the age of 30 seriously contemplating eating the extra frosting with a spoon, arguing that since it is made with Philadelphia it is really OK to do so – and double the quantity of cupcake mix.
In true Nigella style – well I’m guessing here are I’ve never watched a cooking show properly in my life save for a few episodes of MasterChef last September where I learnt that Michel Roux jnr likes a good jus and believes that chefs are in general far too stingy with their caramel sauce – I made up four sub-batches of the frosting: pink, pale blue, pale green and easter cheep yellow. We ended up with 8 cupcakes (prompting the decision to in future make a double batch of mix) very prettily iced and decorated with the pre-approved sprinkles – Jon drew the line at silver balls that crack his teeth.
Left with an inordinate amount of icing I ended up making another (1/2) batch of the cake mix and using the mini flan cakes threw together a four layer cake, which I ended up devouring yesterday. All I can say is cream cheese frosting is addictive.
I shall be making them again, Jon and have decided that we shall get a cute cupcake stand when we next descend on John Lewis, for Amelia’s birthday, since cupcakes will negate the need for cutting a store bought cake into an irregular number of evenly matched slices.
Oh, and please spare a thought for my hand mixer which gave its all in the pursuit of mixing the frosting… Farewell gentle appliance, and darn you!
They look delicious! I’m intrigued by cream cheese icing though – doesn’t it taste… cheesy?
No! Cream cheese frosting is soft and creamy and the best stuff in the world. Or at least the best frosting. Mmmm, cream cheese frosting.
It does have a def. cream cheese taste – it is mixed with icing sugar – but it is surprisingly tasty and less teeth clangingly sweet than buttercream icing.
hmmmm they look delicious! x
Oooh, and I shall try this too!