Lavender Cupcakes

Spring is a time of year when I feel like preparing food. Often this feeling manifests itself as baked goods, but sometimes as cooked stuff too. In this case, I felt like making something fancy. I toyed with the idea of a matcha green tea cake, as seems to be the rage all over the internets, but I don't have match tea powder and I'm too cheap to buy any. Then I remembered that I had a bunch of dried lavender and I'd never really figured out what to do with it. I would turn it into lavender cupcakes! Perfect!

But what kind of cupcake? I knew I needed a recipe that called for some form of liquid, that I could steep lavender in to give the cupcakes a lavender flavor. I started looking up recipes, and most of them were pretty heavy, which is fine, but I worried that the lavender needed a light cake to go with its delicate flavor. Almost like an angel food cake, but angel food cake cupcakes just didn't sound right. And then I stumbled across the solution-- Sponge cake! Similar to an angel food cake, but slightly heavier, I decided this would be the cake I was looking for.

As for frosting, I thought of just doing a lavender buttercream frosting, but stumbled across a recipe for a while chocolate frosting, and that sounded better. It tasted pretty darn good, too...

Ingredients
For the cupcakes:
1C flour (all-purpose flour works here)
1.5 tsp baking powder
1 tsp vanilla extract
5 tbs hot milk
1C granulated sugar
2 eggs, whites and yolks separated
1/2tsp salt
3 tbs dried lavender flowers
1 blackberry herbal tea bag

For the frosting:
6 tbs white chocolate, good quality
4 tbs butter (this is a 1:1.25 ratio, if you want to go with it that way)
2 tsp milk
2-3C icing sugar
4 tbs cream cheese


The method:
The first thing you will do is make the lavender milk. Put ~1/4C of milk into a small saucepan, and add the teabag and the lavender. You can leave out the teabag, but I found it gave the cupcakes a slightly purple tint, which I liked. Heat the milk and stir around the stuff in it for a while, and once it smells very strong and is colored purple, strain all the stuff out of it.

Meanwhile, beat your egg whites to stiff peaks. Put your yolks, 1/2C of sugar, milk, and vanilla into a big bowl, and beat them to combine. Add the rest of the sugar, the flour, salt, and baking powder, and then fold in the egg whites.

They say to bake these in an ungreased pan; maybe this is where turning a cake recipe into a cupcake recipe fell through. I was not able to easily get the cupcakes out of the cupcake tins; I do remember taking the bottom off the angel food cake pan and cutting around the edge last time I made one of those, maybe that is the problem. Anyway, bake these little suckers at 350 degrees for 10-20 minutes, or until they look done. Don't fill up the cupcake molds too far, because the batter needs to be able to climb up the sides of the pan. I filled mine about 1/2-2/3 full. Let them cool completely before frosting.

Frosting
Set a pot of water over a burner and get it boiling. In a large heat-proof bowl, add your chocolate and butter and whisk these together until they are just melted. Remove the bowl from heat and start adding the icing sugar until you reach a texture you're happy with. Add the cream cheese and beat that into the frosting. You may have to add more sugar after the cream cheese. This frosting will harden up a bit as it cools, so work with it while its still a little warm.