Gingerbread Cupcakes

I decided to go home early yesterday, and what better to do with the extra time than bake cupcakes?  I wanted to try a different recipe from VCTOTW, and it was a toss-up between carrot or ginger cakes.   I imagine you've already guessed the outcome of that quandry.

I followed the recipe almost to the letter, the only slight problem was I only had half a lemon, so trying to source enough zest was a problem.  Oh, and I didn't have light molasses so swapped it for golden syrup which I presume is similar.  I also added a tiny bit of black molasses for flavour.

As I had no neutral-tasting cream cheese to make cream cheese frosting with, I went with the lemony buttercream option.  I wanted to practise my piping, and after last time's was too soft, decided to put the icing in the fridge until it was needed.  As a result I ended up trying to pipe really cold, unpliable icing, so the decoration wasn't the best.  I tried to cover this up with strategically-placed pieces of crystallised ginger.

Outcome: these tasted way better than they looked after my bodged decoration attempts!  They have a really delicious caramel/ginger flavour, and a very soft and light texture.  The lemon frosting went beautifully,  My only negative observation is that before cool the cakes seemed slightly greasy.

I'm not sure whether or not to be annoyed that people are constantly surprised that my food isn't disgusting.  These cakes prompted the question "how can these be so delicious when there's none of the good stuff in them?".