Day five. Time for a savoury cupcake! How do cheese cupcakes topped with a smoky tomato buttercream sound to you? It’s an awesome combo, but the inspiration for the components came from worlds apart!
Cheese Cupcakes with Smoky Tomato Buttercream
The cheese cupcakes are inspired by a springy, moist cheese muffin which was just riddled with cheese. I had it in a private hospital in New Zealand, for one morning tea once. I confess it was the first thing I’d eaten for probably a day and a half but it was so awesome. Whoever said hospital food was inedible never had one of these! I’ve searched for years and years for the perfect cheese muffin recipe to match my memory. I actually haven’t had much luck finding a recipe until this year, when I found a recipe on Taste.com.au apparently from Annabel Langbein which was really very good. So I dutifully made them and pinned the recipe to Pinterest… and then the lovely webmasters took the link away, leaving me with only the echos of the recipe in my head. I’ve done my best… but I totally got it!
One bouffant cheesy cupcake!
The smoky tomato buttercream inspiration came from a more illustrious source – Hercules Morse in South Melbourne uses it in it’s “Fish Fingers” dish – fingers of toast, roasted tomato butter and white anchovies dressed in parsley oil. My mother figured out how to make it after a trip to Melbourne a while back. In NZ you can get manuka smoked butter which makes this buttercream absolutely stupendous – no such option here in Australia, but smoked salt does the trick!
Cheese Cupcakes with Smoky Tomato Buttercream
These would be super canapés, made in a mini size so you can pop a whole one in your mouth.
Cheese cupcakes
ingredients
4 cups grated cheese, slightly compacted
2 cups flour
4 tsp baking powder
½ tsp salt
1 tbsp sugar
4 eggs
1 cup milk
mixing
Line a 12 hole muffin pan with paper cases and spray with non stick spray.
Toss the cheese, flour, baking powder and sugar together. Combine the egg and milk in a separate bowl, then pour over the cheese mixture. Mix with a wooden spoon until only just combined.
The mixture. All cheez.
Spoon mixture into cupcake cases, filling them right up. Bake at 180 degrees Celsius for 20 minutes.
When cold, pipe a small star of smoky tomato buttercream on top.
Smoky Tomato Buttercream
ingredients
4 large tomatoes (to yield 200ml of pulp)
200g butter – smoked if possible
1 ½ tsp sugar
½ tsp salt
black pepper to taste
mixing
Halve the tomatoes, put in an oven proof dish, splash with olive oil, sprinkle with salt and roast for about an hour until the skins brown a little and the flesh collapses. Cool, remove the seeds and juice, strain and reserve. Peel off the skins and blend the pulp until smooth, add the strained juice. In a bowl soften and whip the butter, beat in the pulp, juice, sugar and salt with a good grind of pepper.
Cheese Cupcakes with Smoky Tomato Buttercream
I’d like to dedicate this cupcake to my Mum, who would be all over it like a rash. And, to be fair, who decoded the tomato buttercream from Hercules Morse.
Enjoy!xxx
Thank you for the dedication…this is my kind of food! Heaps of tangy cheese with a smooth flavoursome cream on top. Yum-oh!
Yes Annabel has done that to me too – can’t really blame her but it is frustrating. You have to hand copy her recipes on the spot! Now where are my tomatoes and smoked butter!
Happliy, I think I have done a better job than Annabel’s recipe anyway. These look just like the ones the day after having Mr Pendy out!