Christmas Cupcakes – Snowball cupcakes with Advocaat frosting….

It’s weird how a certain food or drink can remind you so much of someone isn’t it?

Every year, we used to go to my Nana’s house to decorate her Christmas tree for us and every year (from when I was about 11) she used to reward me with a snowball – obviously weaker when I was younger but by the time I got to 18 they were were lethal and I always had to pop out to the kitchen to top up with extra lemonade.

Now every time I see snowballs in the shops or I taste one, it makes me think of my lovely Nana and every year at this time, I buy a nice bottle of advocaat and have a drink to her.  I’ve also made these yummy snowball cupcakes over the last few years too and they’re almost as nice as the drink itself! 😉

In case you don’t know what a snowball is, it’s a mixture of Advocaat, lime juice and lemonade – topped with a cocktail cherry and it’s absolutely delicious!

This is my cakey version of a Snowball….

How to make snowball cupcakes

For the lemon and lime cupcakes:
150g softened butter
150g sugar
2 eggs
the zest of 1 lemon
the zest of 1/2 lime
the juice of 1/2 lemon
150g self raising flour

• Pre heat your oven to 180 c.
• Beat together the butter and sugar until it’s pale and creamy and then add the eggs, one at a time, slowly mixing it all together.
• Add in the flour, lemon and lime zest and the lemon juice and mix together until it’s well combined.
• Spoon into cupcake cases and bake for around 15 minutes.  You can tell when they’re cooked as you’ll be able to put a skewer or sharp knife into the cake and it’ll come out clean.

For the Advocaat Icing:
50g butter
75ml Advocaat (you can miss replace this with some lemon juice and lemon zest if you really want to but you’ll probably need a little more butter if you do)
300g icing sugar

This  icing is is an easy one to make – you just add everything to the bowl and mix… and mix… and mix!  It does take a while to combine everything smoothly if you’re doing this by hand so I always use my electric beaters (or my husband).

You might need more icing sugar if you want a really stiff mixture to pipe on to your cakes.  I always add more as I go along if I need to.

My favourite bit about making cakes is the icing part although I’m not actually very good at it yet!  If you need advice on the best way  to ice your cupcake then I wrote about my method here and although it’s probably not the professional way of doing it – it works for me (most of the time).

Do you have a food that reminds you of someone you miss?

If you liked this recipe for snowball cupcakes you can save it to your own recipe box if you use Yummly – just click on the YUM icon at the bottom of this post.

Don’t miss out on future posts like this – receive updates directly to your inbox by email by adding your email address to the box on the top right of this page and hitting subscribe. You can also find me on BlogLovin, Yummly and Networked Blogs and I’d love to see you over on my Facebook page and on Instagram.