Lemon and poppyseed cupcakes

As you may recall, I work as a Teaching Assistant in the Home Economics department of one of our city's high schools - a job I really enjoy (I love baking, almost did my teaching diploma after my Uni degree, and quite like kids too ;) ).  So anyway, one of the classes we're teaching this year involves a food development unit.  The pupils were told to think of an item they could make for sale in a coffee shop that would fit in well with the baked goods already on offer, but be new and different so as to encourage customers to buy it.

They brainstormed for a while, and we chatted about what might work and why.  Then I was tasked with finding a lemon recipe that we could use in class - so it had to be easy enough for the pupils to do themselves, within the right timescale to fit into a period and with ingredients that we could easily purchase.

BBC Good Food to the rescue! I really like the huge range of tried and tested recipes they provide, plus the colours and photography are great.  I find that the recipes usually work for me, so felt confident in looking for one there.  I settled upon their Lemon & Poppyseed cupcakes, and that choice was approved by my teacher - so we were good to go.

It started out well, one pupil in each team making the sponge, the other the icing.  One pupil was alone, so I joined her and we worked together to get the cupcakes into the oven in time.  And the result?  Oh my, they were delicious!!  

The buttercream was lemony and rich, not too sweet or tart, and the sponge was light and fluffy and had just the right amount of lemon zest.  Mmm...

Hummingbird Lemon Poppyseed cake

For my birthday I got a voucher for Amazon, and chose for myself (ostensibly from the Team) 2 cookbooks - the first book produced by the Hummingbird Bakery and the other from one of the ladies who featured on the Channel 4 tv series Cook Yourself Thin Harry Eastwood's Red Velvet & Chocolate Heartache. 

Having flicked through the former, I was really keen to try out the Black Bottomed cupcake recipe, coz it'd been so good when I'd tried it on my mini-break to London in May.  Also, the Lemon Poppyseed cake looked good.  And I just happen to have found a lovely metal ring cake tin at TK Maxx, which is supremely helpful for this cake, as it's made in - you guessed it - a ring tin.

It was easy enough, and rose beautifully in the greased and floured tin. I was worried that a) it wouldn't rise much as the only other cake I've tried in a ring tin didn't and b) I'd struggle to remove it from the tin.  Luckily, both fears were unfounded.  However, the recipe did state you were to make a drizzle syrup and pour it on to the sponge fresh-out-of-the-oven then tip it onto a wire rack to cool completely before icing.  Logically, I didn't see how that could work, as evidenced by the following photo...

Nevermind, it cooled soon enough anyway.  But because it was on a small plate, the icing overflowed.  And I was slightly heavy-handed with the decorative poppyseed at first...

But it sliced up beautifully and tasted great - soft, light sponge, sticky lemon glaze and sweet lemon icing.  Mmmm, but you do need a tooth pick handy afterwards, ha ha