Little Coffee Cakes

Happy midweek everyone! Hope you have had a smooth first half of the week and are looking forward to a great weekend wherever you are.

To kick start my weekend (I do start early, don't I), I found a really good Little Coffee Cakes recipe. These mini cakes are really moist and rich in flavour. They are incredibly delicious and I can’t promise you that you’ll stop after one little cake!

Copyright Yoyo's Kitchen Adventures

There is no bitterness to these little cakes and they are surprisingly light too. This is the first time I've succeeded in making proper icing however I still need to work on swirling it properly so it does not taste only yummilicious but also looks fabulous!

Copyright Yoyo's Kitchen Adventures

It does look devilish, doesn’t it? The recipe was superb. Even Daniel, who isn’t a fan of icing, finished two little coffee cakes at once! Here's the adapted recipe for these wonderful little cakes.

Ingredients

• 50g golden caster sugar
• 70g butter, softened
• 2 large eggs
• 70g self-raising flour
• 1 tbsp instant coffee mixed with half tbsp water

For the icing

• 100g butter, softened
• 80g icing sugar
• 1 tsp instant coffee mixed with half tbsp water
• 25g plain chocolate, melted

Instructions (Baking time 17 minutes) 

1. Heat oven to 170C. Line 18 holes in 2 bun tins with fairy cake cases. 
2. Beat the sugar with the butter until light and creamy. 
3. Beat in the eggs, one by one, adding 1 tbsp flour at the same time. Beat in the rest of the flour along with the coffee. 
4. Spoon into the cake cases and bake for 17 minutes. Cool on a wire rack.  

Instructions for Icing

1. Beat the butter until pale, then gradually beat in the icing sugar, followed by the espresso and the melted chocolate.
2. Decorate the little cakes with icing when they have cooled.

Tips

Unless we're really desperate to wake ourselves up, we don't drink espresso. That hardly happens so I don't have any at home. I didn't see the point of spending a few Euros on a bottle when the recipe calls for less than 2 tablespoons of espresso so I used oridinary coffee powder which works just fine. As with all the recipes you'll find here, I always put less sugar than what's stated in the original recipes. 

If you could resist digging into these little coffee cakes immediately, I recommend chilling them for a couple of hours before serving. The icing would have set a little more by then. Unlike some cakes which get dry after refrigerating them, these stay moist even after keeping them for two nights.