cinnamonies

I baked some banana cupcakes yesterday (same as my normal banana cake but in smaller cases!) and, being cupcakes, they needed some sort of icing.

I'd found a few recipes for honey cinnamon frosting so that was the plan. Most feedback seemed to suggest that the honey made it too sweet so I settled on a cinnamon buttercream. Unfortunately I'm not a detail person so discovered a little too late that we didn't have enough icing sugar. Fail!

The result was a brown gloop with floating lumps of butter in it. It should have been thrown away really, but I thought it'd be worth a rescue attempt first. I zapped it in the microwave to melt the butter, and then stirred in about 250g flour (50g self raising, 200g plain, don't ask why!) and about 1tsp bicarbonate of soda. Baked it for 30mins and...

There are a few recipes online for cinnamon brownies, all of which seem to be chocolate brownies with added cinnamon. These are different in that there's no chocolate in them, just cinnamon.

As you can see, it's gone a bit hollow in the middle but apart from that they're pretty good. Well, considering they were a rescued mistake anyway! I think the crust on the top is helped by the fact that I used icing sugar. I'm going to work on the recipe to perfect it, but this is a good start!

It went something like this:

120g butter
400g icing sugar
1 dessert spoon cinnamon
50g self raising flour
200g plain flour
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda

- cream butter and sugar (hopefully you're better at this than me but if not, 90 seconds in the microwave will help)

- add cinnamon, flour and bicarb and mix well

- spread evenly in a lined tin and bake at 180c for 20 minutes or until the top is springy to touch. The inside should be gooey when you take them out - that'll set into a moist squidgy brownie-like consistency as the cake cools. If it's really really runny, put it back in for 10 minutes more but do resist the temptation to over cook it.


I'll let you know when I've improved the recipe...