Life is peachy!

Next Monday is the next Iron Cupcake challenge and the theme for May is fruit. I've been thinking about doing something peachy for a while now and have been doing plenty of blog surfing trying to come up with a yummy recipe. However, most peachy bakers all seem to report that the peach flavour in their cupcakes wasn't strong enough. The only recipe that seemed satisfied with their peach flavour involved peach schnapps and since I'm a Mormon I won't be going down that route!

So I thought I'd just have a little experimenting session and see what happened. I tried 3 different types of peach cupcakes: one with actual peach chunks chopped up and put into the cupcake mixture, one with just the syrup from a can of tinned peaches and one with more of a mashed up peach puree. They were all pretty tasty. I especially enjoyed the vanilla cupcake with pieces of real chopped up peach, but as those have found before me the peach flavour just wasn't what I had hoped it would be. I'm afraid I'm a bad blogger and don't even have photos of all my different test runs because Byron and I ate them before I took a photo! so the picture at top is just the type that had peach puree in the middle of the cupcake. I also tinted half the frosting yellow and half peachy orange and did a two tone piped swirl but clearly my peachy colour wasn't quite orange enough as you can't even tell in that picture above they are different colours!

I have gone on a web hunt for some peach flavouring and think maybe this could help my quest for perfectly peachy cupcakes, so I'll experiment again when that arrives.

Upon my blog browsing I found the most amazing looking peach cakes you have ever seen, I bet you would have thought these were real fruit had I not just told you they were cakes but seriously you need to check these out.

Robin Sue is amazingly talented and after seeing these little beauties I thought I could replicate some for my entry. However, my talents are just not that advanced and I was lacking in resources! I didn't have the ball pan she used, so my peach cakes didn't even start life looking like rounded peach halves. I also didn't have any almonds to use as the peach stones, or cinammon sticks and mint leaves to replicate the stalk and leaf. I did make my own sanding sugar (thanks for the tip - how much money is that going to save me!!) and had never thought of doing this before. I just mixed some yellow food colouring with caster sugar and produced an orange kind of sanding sugar which I rolled my cupcake in. I whipped up some peach coloured frosting and spread it on and then gave up on trying to make mine resemble anything close to Robin Sue's so I give you my half hearted attempt:

and here are Robin Sue's in all their glory!

Robin Sue, I am in awe of your skills!!