Messy cupcakes are well cuter

I love making cupcakes because it means I get to use my 24 nozzle piping kit (ta mum). However, mine NEVER EVER EVER look all perfect and neat so I've stopped trying and just let them be a lil bit wonky. I made these for a friend's birthday (baked goodies make such a good present when you're broke), plus it was my first attempt at brown sugar Italian butter cream which was delish. I made three different types - the pink ones are raspberry, white ones are pink grapefruit and the ones with the chocolate chips are vanilla. I just used my basic cupcake recipe, separated into three bowls and added the different stuff.

Basic Cupcakes

• 175g of butter (soften it up in the microwave a wee bit)
• 175g caster sugar
• 3 eggs (beaten)
• 175g self-raising flour
• 1 pinch of baking powder

Pre-heat your oven to 170c (this is for a fan oven, reduce it by 10-20c for a normal oven). Mix up your butter and sugar until super creamy (this is your trick for light cakes, the longer you whip it the lighter your cakes will be), add in the rest of the ingredients, spoon into paper cases and bake for 15 minutes(ish).

For the raspberry ones I chucked some raspberries into the batter, for the grapefruit ones I squeezed half a pink grapefruit and grated some of the rind into the batter and for the vanilla ones I added a teaspoon of vanilla extract and a handful of chocolate chips (then ate a handful to myself obviously).

Ok, now for the topping. I seem to make butter cream up as I go along but here is the basic outline:

Basic Butter Cream

• 50g butter (again - soften it up)
• 140g icing sugar
• Nice splash of milk

Mix it all up and you're done! For the raspberry and the pink grapefruit butter cream I didn't add any milk, I just added the fruit/fruit juice, you may need some more icing sugar for the raspberry one as it goes quite liquid, also add your raspberries a couple at a time to avoid it turning into sugary pink water! For the brown sugar Italian butter cream I got some help from Martha Stewart here , it's really good and way easier than it looks.

Ta da, all boxed up with a little diagram of the flavours