Sunday 15 November 2009

Hummingbird's ginger cupcakes


This week i decided on ginger, partly because i thought the warming spice would take the edge off of the miserable rainy weather and mainly because of hubby's insistence. After initial dragging of feet from me, i left it up to the supermarket gods, if stem ginger was stocked in Sainsbury's i'd make them and dammit it was!

I chose Hummingbird's to see if they were any better than the banana and chocolate recipe, but oh Hummingbird! I'm beginning to wonder if you have deliberately altered recipes?Yet again the amount of ingredients in both the sponge and buttercream were questionable.

Firstly if you do make these cupcakes please avoid using all 200g of stem ginger, it is far far too much and the ginger ended up sinking to the bottom which caused the sponge to break in half. I'd suggest using around half the amount, but do amend according to your preference to ginger.

Next i'd have to call into question the ginger syrup made to put on the cupcakes before the buttercream. It seems a tad unneccessary and didn't really make an impact once i'd added the frosting. I'd recommend using either the syrup or the buttercream and i'm sure the leftover stem ginger would have been better used as part of the frosting.

I did enjoy the lemon and ginger combination of the frosting, but it seemed a slight waste of ingredients to use fresh ginger and milk rather than the stem ginger syrup. I'd suggest less butter and milk, or more icing sugar depending on your frosting style as if you did follow the recipe exactly you'd end up with a runny mess.

Unfortunatley these Hummingbird cupcakes score a rather lowly 4/10.

3 comments:

  1. Like the sound of the lemon & ginger combination, but I think you are right 200g of stem ginger sounds a lot - assuming you are making 12! Still, they look really good.

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  2. hello ! i made them today . i used honestly about 50 g of the stem ginger and i used sme fresh ginger in the mix . i made the cream cheese frosting with a few chunks of the stem ginger through it it worked perfectly . I didnt bother with the boiling milk and ginger it was too messy and mine worked out perfectly ! also , i only got 10 cupcakes out of the mixure but enought frosting for twenty , and im not mean with the frosting ! x

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  3. Mmm, I have several cupcake recipe books, including the hummingbird and the primrose books and I must say, apart from the red velvet recipe, that I prefer the cupcake recipes in the primrose book. The hummingbird recipes seem a bit insipid or something, for example they use cocoa powder instead of actual chocolate, which does not taste the same. Having said that, the hummingbird recipes for the regular brownies and the banana bread are AMAZING and my friends and family are always asking for them!

    Will be making the ginger cupcakes from hummingbird on Sunday so will take your comments on board. Thanks!

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