Triple Cherry Cupcakes are ideal for cherry cake lovers (me) and just the thing for a charity Cupcake Day. These are cherry cakes with cherry-flavoured buttercream icing and a maraschino cherry on top.

Triple Cherry Cupcakes

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Charity Cupcake Days

Lots of charities are organising cupcake days, coffee mornings or tea parties – and what a good idea. Eat cake and raise money for a good cause!

Since Cherry Cake is my favourite, I’ve devised a Triple Cherry Cupcake using cherries everywhere, including cherry brandy in the icing. You could use sieved cherry jam if you prefer, or if children will be eating them, although to be honest there’s about 1/2 teaspoon of cherry brandy per cake so it won’t do much harm, but the flavour will be different.

Cherry Buns were among the first recipes I cooked as a child. I still have my Good Housekeeping Children’s Cook Book and the cakes are based on that recipe with some tweaks. Actually, a lot of tweaks, as the original didn’t include the decadence of icing and a cherry on top as well as cherries in the cake. But this is all in a good cause, so it’s fine to go over the top.

Charity Tea Party Dates 2019

13 June – The Alzheimer’s Society’s Cupcake Day
20-23 June – Marie Curie
27 September – Macmillan Nurses

Glacé Cherries

As with everything, we now have a choice of glacé cherries. You can have the original bright red ones or the darker undyed cherries. I prefer to use undyed cherries but it really doesn’t matter – apart from the colouring if you have a sensitive child.

I’ve used a maraschino cherry on top because they are the perfect size and colour. You could easily use half a glacé cherry instead, especially as this recipe doesn’t use a whole pack of cherries.

Being lazy, I tried to make these cakes by halving the cherries and not washing them. Big mistake. Quarter the cherries at least. There isn’t enough cake to support halves and they sink. They don’t get very evenly distributed through the cakes either.

The cake mixture

Making these Triple Cherry Cupcakes with a standard Victoria Sandwich recipe doesn’t really work. The cake is too buttery and not substantial enough. The recipe I used here has more flour than butter and sugar so it gives a slightly denser cake, which supports the cherries better, as well as the icing.

I’ve added the zest of a whole lemon, partly because I like it but also because it seems a waste not to. If you only have half a lemon though, it’s fine. On the topic of not wasting, as I didn’t use the rest of the lemon for these cakes, I cut it into slices and froze them to use in drinks. You don’t particularly see the lack of zest when you use them in a G&T.

HELPFUL TOOLS

Lemon zester – I came late in the day to lemon zesters. I used my old box grater (with a different cutter or grater on each side for any requirement) for years. The last time I used it for a lemon I grated my knuckle so badly that I finally gave in and bought a zester. Why didn’t I do it sooner?
Wilton icing nozzle set – This set of three icing nozzles are useful for piping icing onto cupcakes. They’re the only tips you’ll need – big enough for cakes, but not so big you end up with more icing than cake! Use the star tip for these cakes
Disposable icing bags – I used to use a nylon icing bag that I washed every time, but that started to seem like too much of a chore with everything else to manage, so I switched to making bags out of baking parchment. It’s a good idea but rather fiddly, time-consuming and they can split, so I wasn’t any better off. Thank goodness for silicone. A pack of 50 will last for years.

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