Sticky Toffee Pudding Cupake
Ingredients
200 g dates
200 g boiling water
90 g margarine
130 g dark brown sugar
3 eggs
1 tsp mixed spice
200 g self raising flour
2 tsp Caramel flavouring Decoration
200 g butter
400 g icing sugar
1 tsp caramel flavouring
50 g caramel sauce
Method
1) Preheat the oven to 170C / 350F/ gas mark 3. Start, by placing your dates (de-stoned) and blitz them until they form a paste. Use your hand blender as that blade cuts the dates up (you can use a food processor). Then, pour boiling water over the dates to loosen them up and get them to relax after all the whizzing.
2) While your whizzed up dates are relaxing, begin making the cupcakes batter which starts by beating together your butter and sugar until combined. As we are using dark brown sugar, this may take longer as the sugar needs to fully incorporated into that butter.
3) 
Once you have your butter and sugar combined, fold through your eggs and flour. Do not overmix at this stage as your gluten will activate in your flour and you will get a very chewy dense cupcake.
4) Finally, fold through my caramel flavouring, mixed spice and blitzed up dates. At this stage, you could add 100 g of any nuts or raisins you want (I like mine without any).
5) 
Finally, you need to spoon (you can use an ice cream scoop) your batter into your cupcake cases until they are around 1/2 way full. These cupcakes rise more than your normal cupcakes, so do not fill them more than 1/2 way. Then, bake for 20 minutes or until a cake tester or skewer comes out clean.
6) Now, beat together your butter, caramel flavouring and icing sugar until combined. As we are adding that caramel flavour, there no need to pre whip your butter as we don't need it to be light as that caramel colour will react with it and turn it beige.
7) 
Finally, before we can eat, core out the centre of your cupcakes and fill with caramel sauce, use these centre to crush up for the topping. Transfer your buttercream to a piping bag (fitted with an open star piping tip) and pipe a rosette by starting in the centre and working my way out wrapping around as you go along. I finish with some crushed up crumbs