I really liked the first Rose Cake recipe I came up with in versions 1 and 2, but I wanted to try again using fresh petals. To try out two different ways of incorporating the rose into the cake, I split the butter cake batter and tried two versions. In version 3, I soaked the petals (mostly red this time) in the milk and then strained them out and continued with the batter normally. For version 4, I blitzed red rose petals into the milk before incorporating this into the batter. This turned out to be the best version, so it is the one I am including below!
For these cupcakes, I made a butter frosting, incorporating rose petals blitzed with milk into a normal butter frosting. It was beautiful! This frosting also worked very nicely with lemon cupcakes, too, just, you know, if you're in that kind of a mood.
Ingredients:
For the cake:
1 3/4 c sugar
2/3 c butter
2 eggs
2 3/4 c flour
2 1/2 tsp baking powder
1 1/4 c milk
1/2 c fresh rose petals, roughly chopped
For the frosting:
1/2 c butter, soft
1/2 - 3/4 c cream cheese, soft
1c (ish - this boils down to taste) powdered sugar
1/2 c fresh rose petals, roughly chopped
3 tbsp milk
1) Blitz together milk and rose petals. Let sit for 30 minutes to allow the rose flavour to infuse the milk.
2) Cream butter and sugar together until fluffy. Beat in eggs one at a time.
3) Mix flour and baking powder together, and add alternately with milk, starting and ending with flour. Mix well and pour into a prepared pan or cupcake tins and bake 30 -35 minutes at 177°C. Remove and cool on a wire rack.
4) Place butter and cream cheese in a bowl and beat until fluffy and homogenous. Gradually add the powdered sugar, taste testing until you like it.
5) Blitz rose petals with milk until smooth. Incorporate into frosting. Frost cake or cupcakes.
I added slightly too much milk to my rose petals, so the frosting came out as more of a drizzle than a frosting, but it was very tasty just the same. The cake was light, fluffy and moist with a very nice crumb and a delicate rosy flavour. It was slightly bluish though because of the colouring of the rose petals once blitzed. I do want to try it with yellow rose petals for comparison, but so far, I am more than happy to stick with this.