Well how on earth did I manage that? Let me explain!  At Christmas and birthday times my family make very good use of the Amazon wishlist – we barely buy anything from Amazon but we use the list facility to share what we would like and my sister had a handheld food mixer on hers.  I did a bit of research and found one I thought she’d like (for that read ‘one I’d like so she’d probably like it to’!) and bought it.  I went home and was all ready to tick the ‘Bought Elsewhere’ button when I realised it had disappeared from the list that very same day.   Now any sensible person would probably have returned the mixer to the shop – not me, I’m not sensible, I like a new gadget so I’ve finally got around to testing it out by making these Cherry and Almond cupcakes to put in our packed lunches this week!

You will need: 125g butter, 125g caster sugar, 2 medium eggs, 40g ground almonds, 90g self raising flour and 90g chopped glace cherries.

Preheat the oven to 190°C and line a tray with 12 cupcake cases. Using your rather beautiful new food mixer, cream together the butter and sugar.  Carefully add the eggs (without attempting to decorate the kitchen walls) and gradually add the flour (taking care not to make the kitchen look like a snowscape!).  Add the ground almonds and glace cherries and mix until well combined.  Spoon the mixture into the paper cases and bake for 20 minutes.   Much quicker and far less effort than the normal elbow grease it takes to mix cakes!