Nimble Nibbles: Pot of Gold Cupcakes - St. Patrick's Day Baking

Hello Everyone!
Welcome back to the blog for some more festive baking (my favourite type of baking). This week I whipped up some St. Patrick's Day treats and decided to share the results with you all :) These cupcakes are perfect for the upcoming festivities and they also happen to be egg-free - double yay if you have an egg allergy or just don't have any in the house
So let's get started...

You will need:

200ml water
85g butter
85g caster sugar
1tbsp golden syrup
3tbsp milk
1tsp vanilla extract
1tsp bicarbonate of soda
225g plain flour
2tbsp cocoa powder
Food colouring in rainbow shades
some types of chocolate/ candy to form the pot of gold - I used Ferrero Rocher

1. Preheat your oven to 180°C and line a cupcake tray

2. Put the water, butter, sugar and syrup into a saucepan and heat until the sugar is dissolved and the butter has melted

3. Bring the mixture to the boil, reduce the heat and cook gently for 5 minutes

4. Mix the milk, vanilla and bicarbonate together in a small jug

5. Sieve the flour and cocoa powder into a bowl and add the syrup mixture

6. Mix in the milk mixture until smooth

7. Spoon the mixture into your cupcake cases, I got 9 cupcakes out of this recipe, and bake in the oven for about 20 minutes

8. Once the cupcakes are out of the oven and cooling you can begin to make the icing: all you gotta do is follow this recipe using half the ingredient quantities and no food colouring

9. To pipe the icing with a rainbow effect you will need a food paintbrush and some rainbow food colours. Simply paint stripes of each colour up the sides of the piping bag

10. Pop the icing into the bag and pipe whichever design you fancy onto the cakes - I did classic swirls. I'm not going to lie this is where a mini disaster occurred; after piping my first two cupcakes the colours started to run in the bag and I was left with more of a rainbow unicorn coloured icing rather than a white icing with rainbow stripes. However it was a pretty colour and not really noticeable under the pot of gold :)