Easter Egg Nest Cupcakes & feeling hot, hot,hot!

As Easter is rapidly approaching, there are plenty of Easter bakes I´ve been wanting to try out so hence the following recipe. We were also off to a friend´s house for dinner and I always like to take something and what could be better than cupcakes?

Yesterday was a beautiful, sunny day with temperatures of about 30ºC.....it seems more like summer than spring! The only thing is, I don´t feel like baking as much, what with the heat of the oven combined with the sweltering heat of the summer-I think I´ll have to start making cold desserts soon! Plus in our block of flats they are still turning on the central heating....which is a complete waste of energy and money as at 30º C, we definitely don´t need it!

This is another recipe from my cupcake calendar but is maybe not the best thing to make on a hot day as all the chocolate kept melting and ended up everywhere!

Ingredients (makes 16-18)

1 cup butter at room temperature

1 cup caster sugar

2 cups self-raising flour

4 eggs

1 tsp vanilla extract

decoration

2 tbsp cream

4 1/2 oz chocolate, chopped

grated chocolate (a Flake would be great for this)

Cadbury´s Mini Eggs/chocolate eggs or other candy eggs (As I can´t get Mini Eggs here, I used some chocolate eggs from Lidl)

Method

1.Line 2 muffin tins with cake cases and preheat oven to 175ºC (350ºF)

2. Place all cupcake ingredients in a large mixing bowl and using an electric hand whisk, beat for about 2-3 mins.

3. Bake for 20 mins.

4. While cupcakes are cooling, place chopped chocolate and cream in a bowl in a pan of boiling water and stir till all the chocolate has melted.

5. Decorate cupcakes with ganache, grate chocolate over the top (for the "nest") and place 2-3 mini eggs on top (I only put one egg on top as they were quite big and it looked silly with more than one egg)