This week my lovely housemate took me to one of my local shops and I got to pick out some fresh produce for myself for the first time in a month! Once the excitement wore off, I stumbled across some blood oranges and couldn’t resist putting them in the trolley. Once I got home, I realised I’d have to find something special to make with them, and stumbled across this recipe for chocolate cupcakes with a blood orange icing.

With all of the extra time I’ve been spending at home with this ankle, I’ve been doing a lot of extra crochet – so much so that I’ve injured my thumb so have to give it a rest for a bit til it’s all better. In the meantime, I’m focusing on my cooking and finding delicious recipes!

I’d never actually had blood oranges fresh, always in drinks, but I knew how much I loved orange and chocolate flavours together and thought this would be a winner. Since I didn’t have enough fruit to use all of her recipe, I decided to focus on the blood orange flavour and the icing of Amanda’s recipe.

I mean, look at those colours, there is no way that I couldn’t make these the focus of my cooking this weekend. With my ankle still on the mend, reducing the juice into a syrup was a little taxing, but I managed to move a chair into the kitchen to give my ankle a break between stirs. I think I reduced the syrup a little too far in the end as once it cooled it became more like jam in texture. But never fool my work didn’t go to waste and it worked well once I mixed it into the icing. The citrus flavours cut through the sweetness just a little and this combined with the chocolate was perfection. I also brushed a little of the warm syrup onto the warm cupcakes as per Amanda’s suggestion in her recipe.

As for the cupcakes, I totally cheated and used an awesome box mix that I’ve discovered that is both lactose and gluten-free. It’s tried and tested for me, and I just separated it out into 12 cupcake liners.

I piped the icing on last night ready for photographs this morning. I noticed a few have gone missing overnight so I’m assuming this means they got the housemate’s seal of approval too! 🙂 These are so tasty, I’m trying to make them last – but you might notice there are not 12 in the photo above, whoops!

If blood oranges are in season in your area you have to give this a try! Let me know if you have any other recipes for me to try with blood oranges!

Happy cooking,
Meagan x