April Baking Club Update

April 2023 – Easter treats

For most New Zealanders, Easter is the kind of holiday where we might eat an Easter egg and a couple of hot cross buns, but unless we’re Christian, really it’s about savouring the long weekend and getting out of town, or spending some time in the garden. So when I checked the theme for Baking Club and found it was Easter treats, I wasn’t sure what to make.

Hot cross buns would be the obvious choice, but I just don’t enjoy making bread as much as other things. A search online suggested all kinds of spring-appropriate bakes, suitable for the northern hemisphere, or decoration-heavy baking, which is also not my forté.

I spotted a cute picture of cupcakes with crosses on top, and thought, “perfect!” I love the spiced flavours of hot cross buns. The recipe I found was American, so I decided not to use it and went with a tried and true recipe – the basic vanilla cupcake from the Edmonds website. I added generous teaspoons of ginger, mixed spice, nutmeg and cinnamon, and put them into mini cupcake papers (the thing about Baking Club is that you want to try EVERYTHING, so serving sizes have to be small).

I’ve never piped icing before (I think we’ve already established that I’m a lazy baker), but I decided to be brave. I mixed up a basic icing using milk and lemon juice instead of melted butter, snipped off a tiny corner of a small zip-lock bag and carefully spooned the mixture in. Piping on the little crosses was far less stressful than I had envisaged, and I was pretty happy with the outcome. My hot cross cupcakes were successful!

There was a delightful mixture of baking on offer, from a festive wreath to filled chocolate eggs, sugar cookies of the American and German varieties, bunny shaped shortbread, and even a “bunny cake” – a rich, orange-flavoured cake topped with caramelised carrots.

Bonus tip from one of our newest members: if you have no yellow food colouring, the tiniest bit of turmeric wil do the trick, creating a lovely rich yellow without altering the taste.

11 April 2023

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