Made from Girders?

I'm not scared of much (I have children!) But one of the few things I really don't like is strong winds.  And to take my mind of the stormy weather recently, what better than a bit of therapeutic baking?  My daughter is a big fan of Irn Bru, and I have drunk it now and again since my childhood, when my Grandma used to have it delivered by the "Pop Man" in returnable bottles. In fact, along with prunes, it was a pregnancy craving both times I was pregnant! Anyway, when I saw a recipe for Irn Bru cupcakes, I decided to have a go.

To start with, you have a reduce the Irn Bru to make syrup, and a lot, 500ml of Irn Bru makes 50ml of syrup.  Basically you just put it in a pan and half an hour or so of boiling later, you get this, half a litre reduced to less than a shot glass full, and it got thicker as it cooled:

To make the cake mixture, mix 120g plain flour, 100g caster sugar and 1 and a half teaspoons of baking powder, add 40g room temperature butter and mix with electric mixer (the trusty kitchenaid) until resembling sand.  Gradually add 50ml milk; then whisk another 50ml milk with a large egg and half the Irn Bru syrup and beat into the mixture. Divide between cupcake cases (handy tip, use an ice cream scoop) - don't fill more than half full - I had an overflow situation going on with some of the batch later - and bake at 170 degrees C for 20 minutes. There was enough mixture to make eight rather than the quoted six.

Here's where I deviated from the recipe.  In the past I have used a sugar (or lemon) syrup to pour over the cooked cakes before icing, to keep them moist, as there is NOTHING worse than a dry cupcake. So I had the genius idea of pouring some (non-reduced) Irn Bru - only a wee bit - over the cooked cakes.  I made holes in them with a skewer first so it could get in properly.

After cooling, they were iced with butter icing (50g of butter to 200g icing sugar) with the rest of the Irn Bru syrup added. You could add orange food colouring if you wanted a deeper colour but I quite liked the pale orange you got with just the colour from the syrup.  The icing was a bit stiff so I added one tablespoon of the non-reduced Irn Bru to loosen it a bit. Finishing touch was the blue decorations to reflect the blue on the bottle label.

I was pretty pleased with the result, you can definitely taste the Irn Bru, but maybe next time I'll double the syrup and put extra colouring in the icing, and I might use blue sugar crystals for decoration.  A definite 4 out of 5 though.

My son liked them, but he is more of a Mountain Dew fan, and has asked me to invent Mountain Dew cupcakes next...

I'll keep you posted.

Thank you for reading,

Caroline :-)