Recently, I’ve been getting really into baking so over Christmas I took to the challenge of baking some gluten free cupcakes. The reason behind this was that everyone at work had to contribute something to the Christmas buffet and I appointed myself to be in charge of something sweet. At the time, I worked with someone who was a Coeliac so I had to take his dietary requirements into account, thus bringing about baking the gluten free way.

It turned out to be a breeze. I found a really easy recipe to follow (of which I didn’t save a link tut) which I will recite for you here. I made these cupcakes again last week for my colleagues and everyone seemed to really enjoy them! I only took one picture which happens to be a rubbish one from my Iphone but you get an idea of what they looked like once they had been frosted. I have to travel about 19 miles to work so they sat quite happily on my front seat until turning the final corner into the work’s carpark saw them make a hasty retreat onto my car floor. I was gutted! Thankfully, there was a lid on the cupcake box so all was not lost.

To make 12 cupcakes, you will need:

180g caster sugar

2 medium eggs

1 tsp vanilla extract

1 tsp glycerine (this is optional as I didn’t have any of this and mine turned out perfect)

175g gluten free flour mix

1 1/2 tsp baking powder

1/2 teaspoon xanthan gum

130ml sunflower oil

130ml milk

Method:

1) First you want to pre-heat your oven to 180°C/gas mark 4 and place 12 muffin cases into a muffin tray.

2) Place the caster sugar, eggs, vanilla and glycerine into a large mixing bowl and whisk on high speed for 4 minutes. I have a stand mixer so I used that to combine this part of the mixture but a hand whisk would be fine.

3) Next, in a separate bowl, mix the flour, baking powder and xanthan gum together and make sure they are 100% combined. The best way I have found to do this is to sieve the mixture a couple of times. Another thing to note is, if you are making these cupcakes for someone who is intolerant to gluten, make sure they are not intolerant to xanthan gum as it doesn’t agree with everybody.

4) In a jug, mix the oil and milk

5) Once you have whisked the egg mixture and it is fully combined, add the flour and liquid mixture, bit by bit. Again, I used my stand mixer but on a much slower setting. This part doesn’t require much time whisking as you only need to make sure that everything is evenly mixed.

6) Divide the mixture between all 12 muffin cases

7) Bake for 15-20 minutes or until well risen and golden in colour.

8) Ice your cakes however you like but if you want them to look like mine, I used 140g room temperature butter, 280g of icing sugar, a couple of drops of yellow food colouring and a tablespoon of milk and then beat this mixture by hand. I then left the mixture in the fridge over night to cool as piping them at that temperature would have made a big sloppy mess.

If you try this recipe yourself or know of any other great baking tips and tricks, let me know! Leave me a comment or tweet me at @beasbeautyblog.

Thanks for reading!

Bea x