Me, My Socks and Pie: Butterscotch cookies & Raspberry Cupcakes!

I'm over in Germany having some fun girl-time with my Niece and Sister and you guessed it! Yup, we've done some baking. We used the excuse to invite a friend and her twins over for a little Afternoon Tea and chose to make Butterscotch Cookies and Raspberry Cupcakes. Now my Sis likes playing in the kitchen as much as me, but I bet her cupcakes will be better decorated than mine :-)

The Butterscotch Cookie recipe came out of her Good Food Magazine and is super simple. Its a basic cookie recipe, but with a sneaky addition of some puffed rice breakfast cereal to give them a crunch. We managed to get hold of some Choco Krispies, so they added a bit more chocolate to the mix - no harm in that!

We also added the chocolate chips into the batter, rather than popping on the top for decoration. The recipe says it makes 10 cookies (we doubled-up), but you definitely get more than that. We got 23 from a double batch and they could have been smaller.

We popped them in a Gas Mark 3 oven for 18 minutes or so. Half-way through they were taken out and banged on the worktop (use a tea-towel in between to save the work-top). This helps get out some of the air-bubbles and flattens out the cookies.

Bake until golden brown. They may still feel soft on top, but they will firm up when cooled.

Sweet, but not overly so, with a nice crunch from the Krispies.

Our little kitchen assistant managed to get hold of my Dr Oetker Cupcake Recipe book and chose the Raspberry Cupcake page to look at. She was most insistent that this was the page - so the decision was made - Raspberry Cupcakes it was!

Now the fun thing for this recipe, was that the book is all in German. Thankfully Google Translate came to the rescue and we figured it all out. But you did have to use a little lateral thinking. Cupcake rust = bake until golden brown!

A nice simple recipe again, that used frozen raspberries tossed in cornflour (to help prevent them leak juice everywhere and sink to the bottom of the batter) and yogurt in the batter.

All mixed together, the batter was divided between the 12 cupcake cases......

and then baked for around 25 minutes until just golden on top and a skewer came out clean. Amazingly the raspberries defrosted in the oven and it all baked through perfectly.

The topping consisted of whipping cream, Sahnesteif (a German cream stiffening agent) and raspberry syrup, which was all whipped up until nice and stiff.

Then we had fun with the piping bag! My Sis was much more precise!

Whereas I couldn't stop giggling!

The recipe had way too much cream for the amount of cupcakes - you could easily get away with half. Despite one cupcake missing - well we had to test one to make sure it was alright before icing....................