Cupcakes with kick
After reading ‘Cupcakes with a Kick’, Nathan Adams was left wondering why he never added alcohol to his baking
YOU get two kinds of bakers – those who follow the recipe and those who improvise, I am not the latter. To deviate from a recipe, especially adding alcohol, can lead to devastating consequences. Egg and milk are the first two ingredients that I fear will not react well with the alcohol you add to a cupcake mixture. Alcohol also burns off and different spirits react differently when included in a baking mix.
Thankfully, Simone Balman has done all the hard work, so you can have a blast when adding alcohol to cake mix.
Her baking started almost accidentally: “I started a cake-decorating course after watching the baking shows on the reality channel, and was searching for a “flop-proof ” vanilla cake recipe when I chanced upon a recipe for cupcakes with Bailey’s on Pinterest.”
“This sparked the idea of the marriage made in heaven of combining your favourite tipple with a yummy cupcake. My husband’s regular drink when we were younger was Captain Morgan and Coke, so this was my first experiment,” she adds.
Balman was inspired and says she wanted to start with the classic bakes and booze it up.
“Chocolate cake baked with a dash of cola syrup and infused with rum, and for that extra ‘rumminess’ mixed into the icing as well. This proved to be an instant hit with family and friends and my experimental journey began. Each recipe that I played with was dedicated to a special person, event or memory and is meant to evoke just that by celebrating the drink, but in a cupcake.”
A cupcake is the innocent bake in anyone’s recipe book, so to add alcohol takes away a bit of that innocence.
For Balman it’s a bit different: “Each recipe celebrates the drink and the alcohol aspect of it is definitely in the forefront. For example, the Van Der Hum cupcakes are laden with the naartjie liqueur, but to highlight these flavours I added some chopped citrus peel into the chocolate cake mix.
“Not one of the recipes has its marriage partner ‘hidden’ just to provide a sneaky alcoholic hit.”
As with most cook books, it’s easy for the reader to flip through the pages and then only try out one or two recipes. Balman says if this is your instinct then you must try her favourites, Southern Comfort Red Velvet cupcakes and the Captain Morgan and Coke recipe.
● Cupcakes with a Kick by Simone Balman is available from Metz Press or buy a copy for R173 on Loot.co.za.