• Prep Time: 20 minutes Cook Time: 20 minutes

• Makes 12

Ingredients

• 125g SPAR full fat margarine, at room temperature
• 180ml SPAR castor sugar (150g)
• 2ml Vanilla essence
• 0.5ml Almond essence
• 2 large SPAR eggs
• 205g SPAR self-raising flour (430ml)
• Pinch salt
• 180ml SPAR milk

Icing options

• To pour over:  sieved SPAR icing sugar and a touch of warm water to mix to a slightly runny paste (colouring optional)
• To spread/pipe: SPAR Bread Spread or Full Fat margarine beaten with enough sieved SPAR icing sugar to achieve a stiff consistency, then a little milk to soften to a spreadable mixture (colouring addition optional).

Method

1. Pre-heat oven to 180 °C with oven-shelf one above centre position. Grease or paper-cup-line a patty-pan tin.
2. Cream the margarine, sugar and essences together until fluffy.
3. Beat in the eggs well. Gently blend in the flour, baking powder and salt, and lastly the milk.
4. Spoon the batter into the prepared tin, and bake in the pre-heated oven for 20 minutes.
5. Transfer onto a cake cooling rack after 5 minutes.
6. Store in an airtight container once completely cool.

Icing

• Ice as desired. Use the visual as inspiration for something appealing different, by sometimes using a deeper muffin pan to provide more to work with as a feature single-portion cake.
• Cappuccino: ice cup-cake sides, and use vanilla icing for milk foam, sprinkle coffee powder over, and finish off with half a chocolate coated ring biscuit for cup handle.
• Valentine: using silver-coated cake decorating sweets, a generous swirl of icing with SPAR Squillos fruit flavoured sucker with LOVE piped on it
• Burger: use chocolate coated biscuit or SPAR ginger biscuit to represent a beef patty, red roll-out icing for tomato sauce, and poppy seeds sprinkled on each cup-cake before baking.