White Chocolate Rose Cupcakes

I sometimes feel as though I live in a cottage made of lego. Bright chunky primary coloured everything with Spiderman or Doctor Who lurking underfoot at every turn. Where’s the pretty gone? How did one little five year old manage, so very skilfully, to inflict his Ben 10 will upon everything I own??

Some days I need to re-group. I need an overdose of pink and frilly and sweet and pretty just to remind myself that life wasn’t always one long round of Batman. That once upon a time a person could arrange a delicate glass bowl of the palest sugar pink roses and not come back to find that an alien called GreyMatter has drowned in it, or indeed arrange a little vintage still life on the fireplace without the ugly guarantee of discovering a cyberman leaning casually up against a violet sprinkled postcard…
Yesterday was one of those days and in the absence of a car to deliver me to a shop full of whimsy, sweet sanctuary had to be found in the pantry, and so it was that a white chocolate easter egg and a spoonful of rose syrup were transformed into a plateful of delicate little cupcakes, stupidly simple to bake, and utterly delicious because the flavours were clearly made to merge, but decorated in such a silly fashion I couldn’t bring myself to photograph them…
Ingredients
125g Unsalted Butter
100g White Chocolate (Grated)
150g Golden Caster Sugar
2 Large Eggs (Beaten)
150g Self Raising Flour (Sifted)
1 Tsp Vanilla Essence
Method
1. Melt butter in a saucepan over a low heat.
2. When the butter is almost melted, stir in the chocolate and take off the heat.
3. Stir in the sugar and eggs and vanilla essence.
4. Then stir in flour bit by bit, and bake until the skewer comes away clean.
Let the cakes cool, then mix up a standard glace icing with 100g of icing sugar, 2 tbsp of rose syrup, and sufficient water to get the icing to the right consistency. Drizzle over the cakes, top with a sugar rose and serve, once set, with a cup of Earl Grey.