Oreo Cupcakes

Today has been another lovely sunday of baking cupcakes! Infact, the whole weekend has been cupcake related. Yesterday morning, Karl and I swapped our usual lie in for a trip to the farmers market in Didsbury, Manchester which is there on the second saturday of every month. Karl wasnt quite as enthusiastic as me at the prospect of getting out of bed early on a saturday morning but once we got there and he saw all the yummy food treats on offer he was already talking about going back next month! The main reason for our trip to the farmers market was to visit the stall of 'and the dish ran away with the spoon' .

I have been following them on twitter and drooling over the lovely piccies on their website for far too long and decided it was time to go and sample some of their cakes. Well...we definately weren't disappointed! Karl and I chose 2 cupcakes - Very Berry (vanilla sponge packed with raspberries and topped with vanilla butter cream) and Jaffa (chocolate and orange sponge topped with creamy orange butter cream). Both were lovely and the orange butter cream on the Jaffa cupcake was gorgeous. Karl also tried a chocolate brownie which he said was one of the best he'd ever had - very moist in the centre apparently and I had a bakewell slice which was fantastic. I would love to have had some piccies to post of the lovely cakes but unfortunately I forgot my camera. My excuse...it was too early on a saturday morning for me to be able to remember everything i needed for the day!

Anyway, back to today..I have noticed when reading people's blogs that quite a few people are making Oreo cupcakes. I love these little biscuits and decided I wanted to have a go at making these into cupcakes too. There seems to be alot of variation in the recipes people are using - with some people baking full size oreos into the cupcake, some using chocolate sponges, some using vanilla sponge with broken oreos mixed in, some people using cream in the icing and some using butter cream.

As I couldn't find just one recipe that I was happy with, I kinda incorporated lots of different recipes into one. Due to my lack of a recipe I didnt have any idea how many Oreos I would need. I had two packets in my cupboard already that I bought a few weeks ago but so concerned I was that I would need more, I decided to buy one more packet whilst we were at the supermarket this morning. I think Karl thought I had gone mad and it turns out I had, as I still have one and a half packets left in the cupboard! Oh well..just gives me a good excuse to make some more!

For the cupcakes I used the chocolate cupcake recipe from the Hummingbird Bakery book. In half of the cupcakes I also baked a mini Oreo into the centre to experiment. I then used the Rachel Allen recipe from Bake for butter cream but added vanilla essence and alot of broken up Oreo's. I spent aaaages bashing them up with my rolling pin so that they were small enough to pipe onto the cakes! I then decorated each cake with a mini Oreo. The butter cream on these cakes was so gooood! I will definitely be making these again!