Spumoni cupcake for Iron Cupcake: Earth

photo via Flickr

This is blogger How To Eat a Cupcake's entry for the latest Iron Cupcake baking competition. She writes:

I've been wanting to make cupcakes with pistachios for a long time, and when I saw that this month's Iron Cupcake theme is "Nuts & Seeds" I knew it was the perfect excuse! It only took a few minutes to come up with a delicious flavor combination. My inspiration comes from a popular Italian ice cream flavor called spumoni. The main flavors are chocolate, pistachio, and a fruit flavor which is usually cherry. For the cupcake version I made a two-tone chocolate and cherry cupcake with pistachio Swiss meringue buttercream. Formulating a recipe for the pistachio buttercream was harder than I thought. I googled for a recipe, but I couldn't find one. Surely, I'm not the first person to think of pistachio buttercream! I found a few articles that talked about using store-bought pistachio paste to flavor cakes, but I have never seen pistachio paste anywhere. I decided to make my own and blend it into a batch of my SMBC. It worked perfectly! You could definitely taste the pistachio flavor in the buttercream, and it went very nicely with the chocolate and cherry cupcake. Josh loves pistachios but isn't a huge fan of chocolate, and he LOVED these cupcakes! He texted me from work this morning just to make sure there would be another one here waiting for him when he comes over tonight. :D

Click here for the recipe.