Bake Yourself Happy and Healthy: Sugar free Spelt and Chia Seed Cupcakes

You'll know from all our Kids in the Kitchen and recipe posts that we love to bake in this household. There is something about baking that helps your worries melt away. Whether it is kneading your frustrations away whilst baking bread or the satisfaction that comes from mixing together ingredients and ending up with something delicious at the end of it that you made yourself with your very own hands. There's no doubt about it - Baking is therapeutic.

I haven't always found it this way. I avoided baking for many years as it all seemed a bit technical and I worried whether the magic would work for me. Would my ingredients come out the oven looking fantastic or would they look a mess and be destined for the bin? With a bit of trial and error along the way, now I find that I love escaping to the kitchen to bake a tried-and-tested recipe or get creative and invent my own recipes.

And that's what I'm going to share with you today, my own invention - a (relatively) healthy cupcake recipe which includes much raved about spelt flour and super ingredient chia seeds. With the sugar-free concept also hitting our radar strongly this year, I've used honey in place of sugar as a healthier alternative.

These make cupcakes that can pass as a tasty and healthy alternative to the more traditional Lemon and Poppyseed cupcake - with Chia seeds providing that lovely texture to the cakes.

Ingredients:
110g butter (at room temperature)
100g honey
2 eggs
150g self-raising flour
125g spelt flour
90ml milk
2 tablespoons lemon juice
4-5 tsp Chia seeds
Zest of 1 lemon
1 tsp baking powder
1 tablespoon of sour cream (or make your own by mixing milk and lemon juice)

For the lemon cream cheese frosting (optional - as this bit is not sugar free):
125g soft cheese
250g icing sugar
1 tsp vanilla
Juice of half a lemon

Method:
1. Pre-heat the oven to 180C or 160C (fan).  Line a 12 hole muffin tin with muffin cases.
2. Mix together the butter, eggs and honey (I used a mixer with a beater attachment but you could mix by hand if you need to).
3. Weigh out the flours and baking powder.
4. In a jug, mix together the milk, lemon juice and sour cream and add in a little at a time alternately with the flour until all the liquid and all the flour is incorporated.
5. Then fold in the lemon zest and chia seeds.
6. Spoon the mixture evenly between the muffin cases. (If you want to make daintier cupcake ones you can use smaller cases but I wanted enough room for the frosting to set smoothly on top).
7. Place in the oven for 25-30 minutes.

As I didn't have any sour cream, I made my own by adding a tablespoon of lemon juice to 1 cup of milk and leaving for around 5-10 minutes. I then used a tablespoon of this in the recipe (you can use the remaining sour cream to make fluffy american style pancakes if you don't want it to go to waste).

For the cream-cheese frosting simply beat together the ingredients. This makes quite a runny mix so that you don't need to worry about piping skills, you can spoon the frosting on top of the cakes when they are cool and then decorate with a sprinkle of chia seeds or other decorations.

Tasty cupcakes without the guilt!

This is my entry into the Mumsnet search for a Sanctuary Spa blogger.